Comments on The Belmont Club,"Michael Jackson dead"

To drag this back to the relentlessly practical, how does Michael Jackson's death affect Obama? At first blush it might seem good for the White House, distracting the public from the implosion of his Iran policy and providing cover under which they will try to sneak past the Cap & Trade bill. In my view however it will hurt Obama and the Democrats on balance. First it washes away the Governor Sanford story which was a club that otherwise would have been good for a week's worth of Republican bashing. Second Obama suffers by comparison with Jackson. Jackson might have risen to fame as a celebrity black but he had one thing that Obama lacks, genuine talent. This will help blow the froth off of Obama's celebrity and since he is definitively one of those second tier characters who is mostly famous for being famous people will begin to look at him and wonder what all the fuss was about. He is just another a black man the media is in love with and unlike Jackson's corpus the works of Obama will get limited popular radio play in the future.

Besides, I thought we wanted Razuli dead.

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Charles,
(who linked to the KIngston Trio playing "The Patriot Game."

Small world connections. When I was an Ensign in San Diego I lived in Mission Valley and the only place I could walk to was a bar called "The Patriot Game" that had the portraits of the Easter Martyrs on the wall and hosted the bands that played in Boston, New York, Chicago and if I understood no where else before coming to this small place out West. The food was good and the Guinness was excellent and I got a bad feeling as a junior officer feeling the place was funneling money to the IRA.

During college I learned to shoot pool in a similar place in Back of the Yards. It occurred to me that if everyone whose descendants claims they were in the Dublin Post Office on Easter morning was really there then the British had to call out the army. There must have been thousands of people trying to jam themselves in. Then again they might have been like the huge numbers of Frenchmen who claimed after the war to have been in the Resistance or the millions of Germans who were keeping a Jew in the basement.,