Soylent Pink

View 716 Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Soylent Pink

Soylent Pink

Pink slime — that ammonia-treated meat in a bright Pepto-bismol shade — may have been rejected by fast food joints like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King, but is being brought in by the tons for the nation’s school lunch program. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/pink-slime-for-school-lun_n_1322325.html

This was probably inevitable: if you’re broke and deep in debt but committed to providing free food for your neighbors, you will inevitably seek to find ways to do it at lower costs. The demand for free food is rising. Spam costs too much. What else can we feed them? This was inevitable, and something else will take its place. Eventually you run out of other people’s money.

I see that Julianne Moore, who played a hard core porno star in the soft porn movie Boogie Nights, is now getting the cover page of the Calendar section. Moore is now to be known for playing Sarah Palin in a movie that isn’t likely to be favorable to Governor Palin or to the notion of women in government. Moore received Academy and Golden Globe award nominations for her performance. And today’s news media buzz is about how Republicans hate women, and the candidates’ wives are being trotted out for interviews.

President Obama berates Rush Limbaugh for using unacceptable language.

I do want to note that Julianne Moore is an excellent actress. It will be interesting to see what she makes of Sarah Palin. Palin was thrust onto the national scene without warning, and led about by a number of campaign experts who assumed they knew more about campaigns than they did. I can say that with confidence because I never met any campaign management official who wasn’t more sure of himself than he had any reason to be. That includes me. It’s part of the game: you have to act as if you know what you are doing because everything happens at once and you haven’t time to sit down and analyze all the alternatives and their possible outcomes. You can think one or two moves ahead but you have to rely on principle for the rest. Most campaign management people lost their principles when they were thrown into the contest. Lynn Nofziger was the major exception of those I knew. I tried to be like him. If something seemed wrong, you wanted to think about its implications. Don’t take the immediate advantage every time. At the same time you can’t throw away opportunities.

Sarah Palin was surrounded by such people, all telling her what she should do and say. Some candidates – Reagan for one – had enough internal fortitude to resist bad advice (usually) and had great confidence in their own principles. Most don’t, because the manager types are very good at pretending and expertise that they don’t really have – that comes with the job, and those who don’t seem to be confident don’t generally get hired.

I haven’t read the book that the Palin movie is based on. I am told that the script Moore was given had lines that she just wouldn’t say, and insisted on substituting actual Palin speech from the campaign. That is to Moore’s credit. We’ll just have to see.

Today was super Tuesday. As of just before dinner time in California there were no real surprises. Gingrich got enough delegates to keep him in the race. Romney can’t finish off anyone. And the race goes on. We’ll see about all that tomorrow.