Politics! Sex! Together in harmony at last

Tonight I was at the library way too late reading an article about what an ass Bush was to Germany before the Iraq War and I got all Cindy Sheehan angry. Bush even went so far as to call Gerhard Schroder a "liar" because he had alluded to the President that he had observed the U.S. making a case for war but then refused to support it. Two things stuck out at me about this incident: one, Bush is so delusional, crazy, arrogant, reckless and rude that it never quite goes without saying, and two, Schroder is a ladies man. Okay, maybe that isn't something I gleaned from this incident, but it is something I've learned about him. He is currently on his fourth wife (German nickname: Audi, because its symbol is four rings), and when he was at LSE last week speaking there was an attractive young woman sitting on the stage with him when he was introduced and when he took the podium he said, "Don't worry, that's not my fifth wife." Laughter ensued.

So I was talking to EJ tonight (only we provoke these kind of discussions with each other), and I asked aloud, "Why do womanizers make such good leaders?" FDR, JFK, Clinton, Schroder, and Mitterrand in France, all of these men were good leaders as well as well-known womanizers or cheaters. Nixon? Loyal as a puppy dog. Bush I? Yeah, he likes Babs, but he also likes to grab Teri Hatcher's ass. It's kind of the parallel of his so-so administration. Bush II? Loves librarian Laura and then goes out and screws the U.S. and the entire international order.

I'm calling it the Womanizer theory of International Relations. Think about it: men who like and court the attention of women (especially while married) not only have to balance disparate and/or conflicting interests, but they have to glad-hand and be flexible in their plans. Loyal, committed married men (code: stubborn) are rarely in conflict with their significant others and therefore don't have to work around any schedule but their own.

So what about Tony Blair? Where does he fall? Well, he loves Cherie but is a flirt, so he's still got a lot of public love. Maybe Cherie put the clamp on that flirty behavior and poof! He feels the need to cow-tow to Bush on Iraq.

It's only a theory...


PS--Women are naturally better and juggling and accommodating disparate interests, maybe this will finally prove that they are better leaders after all.

Celebrity abstinence

First things first: let's give a BIG shout out to EJ and her evisceration of Newsweek for its pathetic "slow news week" story. "Girls Gone Bad," features such notable role models as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. The media (paparazzi on up) give these nitwits WAY too much credit, and now too much blame, for the state of American society, body image, and how American girls act. Most women I know are interested in them the way you would be interested in a soap opera: you follow the story, but you laugh when the main character gets impregnated by her friend's boyfriend who also happens to be the long-lost brother she didn't know she had.

I was actually going to write about the U.S. and nationalism, a topic which I am doing a paper on at the moment, but I decided that my writing on the topic should probably be limited to said paper, and that what EJ was writing about was MUCH more interesting.

In protest of the fact that so-called venerable publications like Newsweek have sunk to such depths, I have decided to not actively read any celebrity gossip for one week. This will have two functions. First, I will not know exactly who went to lunch with whom and wonder if they may or may not be dating and therefore valuable brain space will not be wasted. And second, I have been threatening to do this for awhile and now is as good a time as any. So no popsugar, perezhilton, pinkisthenewblog, e! online and I'm even abstaining from gofugyourself for the next week because sometimes as much as it isn't gossip and just catty side comments, the grammys are next week and that makes this whole task that much harder.

I'm going to put parental locks on those sites so I'm not even tempted. This should be interesting.