The Electron Pencil

Slow-Going

Picking up where I left off yesterday, re: the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

It took days and days and days for President Gag to even hint that the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who’d gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia in August were sorta despicable. Nevertheless, we on the Left dog-piled on him, justifiably, for his languidness.

Clinton & Weinstein

Now, the truth about Harvey Weinstein is out there, and has been for days and days and days, yet only this afternoon did Hillary Clinton finally allow that Weinstein’s “behavior cannot be tolerated” and that she was “shocked and appalled” by his asshole-ishness.

What’s good for the goose.

Sure, Clinton and the rest of the national Democratic Party are largely dependent on Hollywood big shots like Weinstein for their allowances. But for pity’s sake, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a woman! At the very least I’d have wanted her to immediately jump on this scandal with both feet (in lieu of her jumping on Weinstein’s ample tummy, again and again and again while wearing spiked heels, which’d be preferable).

Because Weinstein’s dough is such a big part of the Democrats’ support system, you’d think Clinton would want to wash his stink out without dealy.

At one point does a sugar daddy become intolerable?

In the matter of Weinstein, apparently, that point was passed years and years ago. But then again, apparently not for beggars like Clinton.

This is why a lot of people on my side of the fence despise her.

She may well privately justify moving slowly on Weinstein’s bullying because he fattens the Democratic piggy bank and the party needs all the dough it can amass to counter the Republicans’ national gerrymandering and voter access roadblocking. Y’know, you’ve gotta level the playing field, right?

Well, Weinstein’s the wrong bulldozer for that job.

And Hillary Clinton has to be in the forefront of calling him out and disassociating herself and her party from his evil ways.

Because, dammit, she’s a woman.

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Yet Quick On The Defense

Another woman who’s forgotten she’s a woman is Donna Karan. The queen of American fashion peddlers, Karan, in an off-the-cuff interview Sunday, said women in Hollywood who are now stepping forward with charges of workplace harassment against the picture mogul may be “asking for it by presenting all the sensuality and all the sexuality.” Weinstein and his glad-handers, backslappers, and coat-holders, she added, are “wonderful people.”

Wonderful Weinstein & Karan

Karan must have checked her bread to see which side was buttered before uttering these risible comments.

The Weinstein that’s becoming known to the general public has been a topic of discussion among young women as well as those of a certain age for years, nay, decades. Perhaps Karan was too busy becoming a hundred-millionaire to take note of the grumblings of Hollywood’s little people.

Or, if my long and dearly-held hypothesis is correct, simply becoming a hundred-millionaire requires a person to harbor within her or him the seeds of asshole-ishness.

The uber-rich, as Fitzgerald has famously suggested, are different from you and me. It becomes far more important for them to stick together than to cavil about trivial things like fairness and decency, respect and dignity.

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A Rat Tale

A friend of mine, a researcher at Indiana University, is at the mercy of a rat these days.

Let’s call him Vern. Not the rat; the friend.

Vern discovered the creature in his garage. He says he has an allergy to mice so he assumes the odds are really good he’s allergic to rats as well. So, he has decided to de-rat his garage.

A Snap Trap

First he tried the old-school snap trap, you know, the kind we all always saw loaded with cheese in cartoons. Vern baited his snap trap with peanut butter. The next morning he went into his garage and found the peanut butter gone and the snap not tripped. So he tried it again with the same result. In all, Vern baited his snap trap four times and four times the rat got a meal and dashed away w/o paying, as it were, his tab.

Next Vern tied a glue trap. Now, the glue trap is a really savage little thing as you may or may not know. The snap trap, at least, is designed to kill the critter immediately, the little spring-loaded steel bar snapping down on the poor sucker’s spine and killing him, it is presumed, with a minimum of suffering. The glue trap is simply a tray of sticky goo into which the rodent treads and, naturally, finds him or herself stuck thereon. Problem is, the mouse or rat lives on quite a while in agony. Sometimes the little beasts even chew their limbs off to escape it. A real horror.

But Vern is freaked by his unwanted guest and so had to resort to such a sadism. Only the rat, it seems, got stuck in the glue and proceeded to drag the whole tray along the floor of the garage to a ladder lying on the floor. The rat then used one of the rungs as leverage to pry his stuck little feet off the glue. Ingenious, no?

Vern then sealed up the hole at the base of the garage wall that he’d determined was the wily rat’s ingress and egress from the place. Vern used gravel and rocks, snugly packed, to block up the hole. No dice. The rat, a conscientious laborer, simply excavated a new portal through the stony barrier.

So Vern tried the glue deal a second time. He figured the second glue trap wouldn’t work but the things come in pairs from the store so he figured, what the hell? Vern placed the trap near the rat-hole. The next morning, Vern observed that this second trap has been covered over with dust and dirt and some debris like little bits of styrofoam. The rat had neutralized the trap and simply walked over it, unstuck!

Right around that time, Vern tried poison, bromethalin. When Vern returned to the hole area, he found that some of the poison had been nibbled on, the rest untouched. His conclusion: The rat had sampled some of the toxin, decided that further indulgence would be ill-advised and left the rest alone. The little pot of poison, by the way, is still there. The rat to this point has resisted all temptation to finish it off.

Oh, and Vern also has purchased more glue traps which, he says, he’s been scattering around the garage “just for kicks.”

Next, Vern says, he’s going to pop for a live trap. His reasoning? This particular rat is so smart that he’d hate to terminate its genetic lineage. Hell, what with humanity hinting it wants to do away with itself, there ought to be some smart creatures left after the coming holocaust. Vern’s rat may be the Eve or Adam of the next civilization to rule the Earth.

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