When the lights go on again 2
Related to the Oklahoma Classical Era that I've been discussing in Polistra's Dream. Because this happened in Tulsa in 1941, I couldn't quite jam it into the narrative. Nonetheless, it's a great story with an up-to-date Classical Revival at the end:

It was boomtime Tulsa, the summer of 1941. Close to war, patriotism was at a fevered pitch and so was the oil business. The International Petroleum Exposition held here was a major international event, and to the big boys in the petroleum industry, oil really could be personified as a "goddess." A symbolic figure holding aloft a flame was what they wanted, and Marjorie Morrow Anderson had a face and shape for it. ... "I wanted to take art lessons, and decided if I got the job posing I'd use the money to pay for them," she said. She was working two other jobs at the time. She was born on Bruner Hill in a house with no indoor plumbing, she said. She knew what it was like to grow up hungry, and she always had to earn her own way. Having known poverty, she didn't like it.

So she posed for sculptor Clarence Allen, who created a small version of the"Goddess of Oil", intended to be a 40-foot-tall centerpiece for the Exposition. But Pearl Harbor interrupted the effort.

Now a Tulsa organization is trying to build the full statue at long last.

Tulsa was once called "America's most beautiful city," and the "Paris of the Midwest." The oil barons wanted to use their new wealth to create a city that could stand shoulder to shoulder with the great cities of the U.S. and Europe. ... Downtown was a beautiful, walkable, urban village where people could work, live, go to school, and play. Some even envisioned our city as being like Florence: a center for the arts and culture. ...

Yet now, a promising new wind stirs the air. Carried on this new wind is a familiar sound. The sound of people wanting spaces where they can live, work, shop and play within a beautiful shared environment. People are pushing for Tulsa to be great again. ... The "Goddess of Oil" is not only a testament to a cherished vision from the past, but also reflects a newborn appreciation of that vision today.

The full story is here.

PS: Marjorie Morrow Anderson achieved her dream and became a successful artist. Samples of her beautiful work are here.

PS 2: It appears that Anderson died just last week. I was looking for more samples of her art and ran into an obituary, dated July 10.

The world has lost an excellent artist.
  ¶ 7:20 PM

  Revealing
C-span was showing a discussion among top political operatives about this year's Congressional election. The brand-D operative was talking about those new hawkish Western Dems that I find impressive. He said those candidates were the third or fourth choices from the Party's viewpoint. After the losses of '02 and '04, the horizon looked dim to the "real candidates", the lifetime brand-D politicos with long state-level experience and good fund-raising connections. So the "real candidates" refused to run in '06, leaving the party to scrape the barrel. And what did they find? They found some Real Americans instead of the usual Real Party Hacks. (Apologies to Geico for the phrasing.)

You'd think the brand-R operatives would have found this instructive. You'd think they would say "Hmm... maybe we should lop off our first-tier choices and scrape the barrel to find some uncorrupted candidates, some candidates who don't resemble Duke Cunningham, Conrad Burns and Larry Craig." Nope, from the inside-the-system viewpoint, these new hawkish Dems didn't win because the voters liked them; these fresh candidates won because their records were so short that the brand-R operatives couldn't dig up any dirt on them.

Tells you all you need to know about party operatives. The concept of Representing The Voters is alien and incomprehensible to them, in the same way that a Religious Christmas Card is Martian to Barbara Walters. Party operatives are blackmailers, and the only thing they understand is extortion.
  ¶ 6:48 PM

  Obey the courts? Ha!
I haven't been paying much attention to firearms lately. This caught my attention. Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the city gov't of DC to overturn its ban on all guns. The Supremes amazingly agreed with the Constitution last week, probably by accident, and ordered the ban rescinded.

So Dick Heller wanted to take advantage of his victory, because the whole point was to own a tool of self-defense. He was among the first in line to register his gun, now that his court case reached victory.

And the city gov't of DC REFUSED HIM AGAIN.

They will get away with it. Why? Because they are black. Simple as that.

Back in the '50s and '60s, any white mayor or governor who disobeyed an order to forcibly integrate his schools was slammed to the ground by the National Guard.

In this case the Feds won't even issue a piece of paper asking DC to explain its actions. I guaran-goddamn-tee it. The DC gov't is black, therefore anything they do is automatically permitted and protected.
  ¶ 6:31 AM

  When the lights go on again
This was a favorite song during WW2. Especially poignant in England, where the Krauts were bombing constantly. Blackout conditions, to make targets harder to locate at night, were universal in England and common in the US. Houses and schools had blackout shades, streetlights were dark, car headlights were partly covered. Here in Spokane when the grand Davenport Hotel was reincarnated a few years ago, the skylights were still painted black after 60 years.

The most common rendition of the song is by Dame Vera Lynn. I find her voice a bit too Wagnerian, so I was delighted to find a different and specifically American version of the song as an "Easter egg" bonus inside one of the Eyes Aloft episodes.

I've separated out the song, which includes a prayer, for convenient listening.

Listen.

"When the lights go on again" is dramatically appropriate for our current war. In this context it's a shout of defiance against the Mohammedan / Green alliance, which would have Europe and America surrender to both spiritual and electrical darkness.

NO! NO! NO!

Let there be light!

Christian light, nuclear-powered light, hydro-powered light!
  ¶ 1:52 PM

  Are they catching on?
It's good in a way to see the media and government starting to acknowledge that our economy is no longer "Row Buss", and even stating that we should be putting money into infrastructure.

Ahem. Some of us understood this point three years ago, and didn't need any special insider knowledge to reach the correct conclusions. And candidates like Huckabee and Hunter were trying to tell the truth during the primary campaign, only to be shouted down, hissed down, and literally deleted by the Republican machine and talking-point-heads.

Vindication is nice, but it would have been much nicer, and much better for the survival of the country, if the truth-telling candidates had been given a fair chance.
  ¶ 7:28 AM

  Polistra's dream, 3
Part 3 of Polistra's Dream.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

June 1939, Ponca City.


Fran: Come on!

Polistra: Just a minute ...

Fran: We need to get on the lake before the mosquitos take control.

Pol: Hold your horses; cartoon girls need more time for vanity.

Fran: Why cartoon girls especially?

Pol: Haven't you noticed that cartoon characters are ageless?

Fran: Yes... Orphan Annie has been 12 forever. By the way, is she still around in your time?

Pol: No, Annie died in 1968. She was made of honesty and common sense, and when those qualities began to wither in America, she couldn't hold. I miss her. But she stayed the same age to the end, like all of us 'toons. Thing is, it takes a lot of work to stay the same age.


Fran: Oh. I guess that makes sense.... somehow.

Pol: Okay, I'm ready now.


Pol: Pretty fancy apartment hotel, this Arcade.

Fran: Yes, and a pretty important place. Mrs. Annie Rhodes built the middle part of the hotel up in Newkirk around 1910, then took it apart and rebuilt it here when Ponca started to boom. She added the Spanish outer parts later.


Pol: Cute car!

Fran: I love it. Brand new, bought on the installment plan. Six hundred dollars, and worth every bit.

Pol: Six hundred a month?

Fran: No, you silly. Six hundred altogether. Is six hundred a month typical in your time?

Pol: Yes, but wages have inflated too, so it's not as bad as it sounds. What kind of car?

Fran: American Bantam. The company started out making a British Austin, and gradually Americanized it.

Pol: I've heard of the Bantam. It sort of turned into a little military car called the Jeep, that became famous in the war that's coming up shortly. The Jeep basically replaced the horse for the Army.


Pol: You were telling about Mrs Rhodes and the hotel. Is she still in charge?

Fran: Yes, but Lew Wentz owns the place now. He was just another one of those wildcatters who came to Ponca to drill. He showed up here, broke and full of vinegar. Mrs Rhodes decided he had something special, so she grubstaked him and boarded him until he struck a gusher.

Pol: So he bought her out and built himself a mansion?

Fran: Nope, that was E. W. Marland who built the mansions and the monuments to his mistress. He also came here poor and got started by Mrs Rhodes. Marland built Continental, then went broke after the J. P. Morgan interests bought him out. Mr Wentz owns the Arcade and still lives on the third floor. He's a quiet man, bachelor, doesn't like showing off. He puts his money into parks and recreation for Ponca's poor folks and kids. Gives the WPA a real run for its money, though it's building here too. I don't know if any other town of this size has so much beauty and so many services available for everyone.

Pol: Interesting comparison. Two rags-to-riches men who started in the same place at the same time, and chose to use their riches differently.

Fran: What do you have in 2008? Lots of Lew Wentzes or lots of Marlands?

Pol: All Marlands. All ostentation, constantly rubbing their unattainable riches in the face of the ordinary folks.

Fran: It was like that in '29. Then after the crash even the Marland types began to realize the danger of the "Let 'em eat cake" approach to life. I don't think they understand words like unbecoming or inappropriate but they do understand survival.

Continued in Part 4.
  ¶ 11:38 PM

  Impressive Schweitzer
Listening to the National Governors Conf on C-Span. Most of the govs, both R and D, seem to think that our main problem is the need for more Carbon Sequestration, and more federal money for education. The audience wildly applauded these bizarre claims each time.

These governors should be hauled off in shackles, tried and hanged for treason. Well, no trial is needed because they have already publicly confessed to serving the interests of Russia and China over the interests of America.

The single shining exception (among the speakers in this conference anyway) is Montana gov Brian Schweitzer. He's one of those new hawkish western Dems, as Polistra has discussed before.

Schweitzer gave a brief speech, saying (very approximately transcribed):

"As governor of Montana, I connect closely with Canada. Three Canadian provinces border on Montana, and I work with them and observe how they do things. In Canada the provinces have more autonomy than American states. They have the kind of sovereignty that our states formerly had, and because of their autonomy, they do things better than we do. They have better health care, better education, and better resource management. We desperately need to learn from this example. American governors need to say No and Hell No to federal requirements when they prevent us from doing our proper job."

The audience was silent.
  ¶ 9:13 AM

  The few
"These really are good times but only a few know it." --- Henry Ford, 1931

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession. We've sort of become a nation of whiners." --- Phil Gramm, 2008

By 1931 the people had stopped listening to the few who "knew" that these were good times.

I don't think we've quite reached that point in '08, but we're pretty damn close.
  ¶ 7:48 PM

  Fiery Spokane
A surprise windstorm slapped eastern Washington yesterday. Started a number of fires across the state, including one in the eastern suburbs of Spokane. At this point it's mostly controlled, after destroying a square mile of land and a dozen expensive houses.

The fire started at 5 PM, exploded into danger at 5:30. By 9:30 PM Gov Gregoire had flown into town to coordinate the emergency effort with state agencies. As I've noted before, she is a solid executive and an absolute champion in emergencies.

In a sane country, a highly competent governor like Gregoire would be the automatic brand-D candidate for President. Since this is not a sane country, we're stuck with incompetent treasonous Senators on both sides of the "election".

KREM TV has excellent videos, including one eerie shot of broken natural-gas lines forming torches that mark the location of flattened houses.
  ¶ 9:31 AM

  Правительство обладает всеми детьми. 2
The state owns all children.

Especially egregious example in Coeur d'Alene right now. A mother was trying to keep her toddler from darting into traffic while watching a July 4th parade. She apparently swatted the kid once. Eight Nazi assholes immediately complained to the nearest stormtrooper, who immediately ticketed the mother for "injury to a child".

The police chief said "We had no choice. Just think of what could have happened if we hadn't intervened." Yes, a mother might have trained her child to stay out of traffic. A mother might have helped her child to grow up into a responsible adult. We can't let that happen, can we? Much better to let kids be squashed by cars than to let those quaint prehistoric Parent Units exert any authority.


Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Story here.
  ¶ 7:34 AM

  YIMBY
More Oklahoma-related rambling....

Google Street View is a fun toy ... though it's rather spotty, it happens to cover several of the cities where I've lived.




I was surprised to find this house on SE 15th in OKC still looking good. I rented this house in 1972, during my brief and dismal hippie-era marriage.

Note the uniquely Oklahoman decoration in the back yard! It was noisy but somehow reassuring, because it meant the property was important to the landlord.

It was an excellent house: modern, two bedrooms, stone siding, attached garage, partial basement. A park across the street, groceries and other stores in easy walking distance. At that time I was earning about $3000 a year, and I could rent this nice house, maintain a car, and support a wife and baby. No room for major extras, but we were able to eat in restaurants occasionally and travel occasionally.

Using the official inflation figures, $3000 would multiply to about $25000 in today's dollars. Would $25K support a similar lifestyle now?

Not a chance.
  ¶ 1:52 PM

  Eyes Aloft
Polistra has often bemoaned Sultan Bush's peculiar refusal to involve citizens in the war effort, and described how FDR did it.

The Ground Observer Corps, also called the Air Warning Service, kept 150,000 unpaid volunteers busy watching for Jap planes near the coasts.

A new addition to the Old-time Radio section at Archive.org is a full season of Eyes Aloft, produced in Hollywood for the benefit of the Ground Observer Corps in the West. The programs were high quality mixtures of drama, comedy, and information, clearly meant to recruit more volunteers for GOC and to uphold the morale and training of existing volunteers.

But wait, you say ... we don't need all those live eyes now, because we have radar and other electronic warning systems.

Yes, and those systems failed completely on 9/11. NORAD did nothing, FAA did less than nothing. If we had a well-organized set of eyes aimed at mosques and at Mohammedans, we might be able to prevent the next attack.

Of course there's no real point in proposing any of this. Sultan Bush is not on our side.
  ¶ 7:06 AM

  Move over, Frank
Look at this. And track forward to look at the interior as well.

I'm ashamed to confess that I lived in Oklahoma for many years, in OKC for a year, and never heard of this chapel, nor heard of its architect, Duane Conner. The photographer of this set is Conner's granddaughter, presenting a gift to future generations by documenting his work.

Note that the fantastic windows were designed by returning WW2 vets attending Central State University on the GI bill!
  ¶ 9:01 PM

  Amazing fact
While perusing the web for old Oklahoma pictures to use in the next installment of Polistra's Dream, I bumped into Urban Tulsa, a wonderful weekly online paper. It's written from a viewpoint somewhere between New Urbanist and Crunchy Con, if I understand those labels correctly. Editor Michael Bates is trying to steer Tulsa away from cold atomized urbanity and back toward the front-porch comfort of the '30s.

The paper features a variety of articles beyond narrowly Tulsan subjects. One in particular caught my eye. Written by David Deming, a geophysicist at OU, it's a concise attack on the Global Warming hoax. Most of the info is familiar, but this one fact wasn't familiar to me:

Immobilized by a dysfunctional ideology, we sit on vast, undeveloped petroleum resources. In the western U.S. alone, there are three trillion barrels of petroleum in oil shale. At current consumption rates, this is enough oil to provide 100 percent of our domestic oil needs for 300 years. The technology exists to bring this fuel to market for $30 a barrel in an environmentally benign manner.

Let's say it again, slowly.

100 percent of our domestic oil needs for 300 years.

The technology exists to bring this oil to market for $30 a barrel.
  ¶ 7:28 PM

  Starting to appreciate Patty Murray!
Never thought I'd say that.

The national Republicans and their talking-pointheads, including Rush, are still missing a tremendous change in the opposite party. The change may be primarily centered here in the West, not easily visible in New York or Florida. Nonetheless, it's dramatic. On this side of the country, all the new Dems in Congress are hawkish and pro-American. Even the older ones, previously 100% leftish and anti-American, are picking up the new way of thinking.

I discussed the change in more detail here.

Latest example: the "new GI Bill", co-sponsored and heavily pushed by Patty Murray, formerly Osama's best girlfriend. This bill proposes to give returning vets a solid set of benefits, a concrete reward for their service. While Republicans continually repeat "Thank you for your service", the Dems are offering to provide real recompense, just as we gave WW2 vets a real recompense.

People notice these things. When one party works actively and effectively to support American defense contractors and American veterans, while the other party works actively and effectively to donate America to the enemy, people notice. People don't especially care if the parties have traded places (which they certainly have!) ... and people don't care if this change is called a "flip-flop". People only notice which party is serving American interests RIGHT NOW.

At this moment the Dems are working hardest to serve American interests, so at this moment the Dems actually deserve our support.
  ¶ 10:35 AM

  Obama's birth
Picked up on this a bit late, because I've been working on graphics stuff. Looks like a repetition of the Dan Rather National Guard story, where bloggers with expert knowledge spot a forgery.

What puzzles me: The date or place of birth wouldn't have been a reason to discard or forge a certificate. I seriously doubt that Barack's mother had a prophetic vision of her baby's destiny as President, and even if she did, the whole "natural-born" thing is fairly arcane. Most people wouldn't list it among the top ten criteria for a President.

Given that the mother and grandparents were hard-line Soviet supporters, which I've discussed before, it seems more likely that the hapless Kenyan student Barack Sr was simply a convenient placeholder. I'd guess that the real father was a prominent black Communist of less exotic origin, who had a reputation to maintain. In those days, even among Bolsheviks, illegitimacy was a serious stain.

Just for a random example, Barack Jr looks a lot like Julian Bond.
  ¶ 11:28 AM

  Definitions
The textbook definition of socialism is "Ownership of the means of production by government."

A poor definition, because it doesn't strike the major distinction between socialist and capitalist systems, and doesn't evoke the main problem with socialist systems. The main problem: they treat all humans as identical machines. Socialist systems can do this quite easily without claiming ownership of industry.

Nevertheless, people still use such definitions.

All right, so how would we define the American system under Sultan Bush?

"Ownership of the means of production by governments of enemy nations that attacked us."

Does that count as socialism?

No, it counts as abject defeat and surrender.

Arabia started this war. We have never lifted a finger against Arabia; instead we are supinely allowing Arabia to buy our companies, highways, and properties. China has been running a warlike economic campaign against us for 20 years. We have done nothing to fight back; instead we are supinely allowing China to buy our defense contractors, ports, and highways.

Is there a similar example in history? Sure. Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation.
  ¶ 7:33 AM

  Polistra's dream, 2
Continued from Part 1.

June 1939, Ponca City.



Fran: Goat glands!

Pol: Aaah, you mean this isn't bacon?

Fran: No, no, no, goat glands is what I was trying to think of. Your Global Warming cult reminds me of Doctor Brinkley's Goat Glands.

Pol: Doctor Brinkley?

Fran: John R. Brinkley. He's a medical quack, a classic snake-oil seller with a modern twist. He started out in Milford, not far from your home in Manhattan. His big thing is transplanting the, ah, male pieces from goats into the, um, relevant area of men. He makes them think that their ... strength ... will be greatly improved, because I suppose goats represent Natural Virility or something.

Pol: Okay, but how does...

Fran: Brinkley's idea is that you can improve yourself by using the virtues of the lower animals and nature. Mere human virtues aren't enough. Goats are better.

Pol: Aha! Now I see.

Fran: Brinkley built one of the first full-fledged radio stations to advertise his various ... therapies. In an odd way he probably did more for radio than lots of legitimate folks, because he needed to fill time between his sales talks, and he needed lots of power. So he added music and other chat programs, and his engineers developed better transmitters and antennas. He also managed to bribe various congressmen and regulators, or maybe his audience was so large and enthusiastic that the regulators couldn't bring themselves to oppose it. Finally the Radio Commission found its own, um, glands and forced him to move the transmitter over into Mexico where he could run as much power as he wanted. He's still going strong in Del Rio or Juarez or one of those places.

Pol: Yes, but there's still a big difference. Here in '39 the majority of people understand that Brinkley is a fraud. You said the Radio Commission did finally enforce the law against him. Nobody is trying to declare anti-Brinkley people insane. But in 2008 the Global Warming fraud has taken control of nearly everything. Scientists, churches, governments, schools, all the radio and television networks. The anti-fraud forces have a voice, and a fair amount of money on their side, but they are the independent operators, the disreputable ones who are in danger of being shut down at any moment.



Fran: Oh, that's just sad. If ignorance is going to win in the end ... why do I bother writing?

Continued in Part 3 here.

  ¶ 8:56 AM

  Polistra's dream, 1
June 2008, at the Mill.

Polistra was heartbroken to see her home town of Manhattan smashed by a tornado. She is certain that nothing will improve. All factions of the American power structure are frozen in absolute gibbering insanity, utterly incapable of taking the most obvious steps in any positive direction. We have surrendered to Sheikh Osama, surrendered to Reckless Desire and Ruthless Greed, surrendered to every imaginable variety of falsehood and fraud, to every false god known to history, and to some never before imagined.


She prays for relief.


Huh?

= = = = =


June 1939, Ponca City, the Arcade Hotel.



Fran is a free-lance magazine writer. Tonight she's working on a draft while half-listening to Information Please.



What's this? Radio overheating? Can't be. It's a nearly new Philco.



Huh?



Howdy. You're surprised, aren't you? This is going to take some explaining...

And Polistra proceeds to explain the situation ... that she's a cartoon character from 2008 who dreamed her way back to 1939. Since Fran is a writer, she has sufficient imagination to encompass the idea.




Fran asks Polistra the inevitable questions.

Fran: Well, what great advances has America made since '39? Cured cancer?

Pol: No. We have lots of fancy machines and drugs, but except for childhood leukemia, which we can definitely cure, we haven't improved the survival rate in general. You could even say that the fancy machines make things worse, because people know about the cancer earlier.

Fran: That's dismal. Well, cured infantile paralysis?

Pol: Yes, in 1954.

Fran: Cured the common cold?

Pol: No.

Fran: Have you controlled weather? Built domed cities?

Pol: No. In fact we have decided to make no progress in that area. We haven't gone beyond cloud-seeding, and even though we know it works, we won't allow ourselves to do it.

Fran: Eradicated poverty?

Pol: No. The New Deal started a long-running escape from poverty, especially among Southern sharecroppers of both colors. Our entry into the war in '41, which you can probably foresee without my help, expanded that change dramatically. The poor folks moved into industrial jobs, and incomes rose steadily from '39 until 1970. Lots of other things were also improving during those years: science, education, invention. It all came to a screeching halt around 1970. What happened at that point was basically a bloodless takeover by a form of Communism, which we aren't allowed to discuss openly. It's complicated and crazy, and I doubt that I can explain it to you without driving you crazy too.

Fran: Murrr-derrrr! Well, how about fast trains? Super streetcars?

Pol: No. American trains are much slower, less efficient and less luxurious in 2008. They still carry freight well enough, but passenger trains are dilapidated junk, pretty much restricted to serving a few big cities badly. Most people travel long distances by airplane, and that system is starting to fall apart too. Streetcars are mostly gone, though again a few big cities still have good bus and subway systems. In most cities, you're out of luck if you can't drive or can't afford a car. Cars have improved a lot, for what it's worth: they're safer, more efficient, more comfortable. Most of them are made in Japan now, and General Motors is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Fran: Not to interrupt, but you look like you could use a smoke.

Pol: Yes, and thanks for your insight. Smoking is on the way out in '08, but it isn't quite illegal yet.




Fran: Well, how about colonies on Mars?

Pol: Ha. We flew to the Moon in 1969, but then the Communist ideology took over and we haven't advanced the cause since.

Fran: Are you running the country on hydropower?

Pol: No. We're still using the dams the WPA built, which I'm grateful for, even if nobody else is ... plus a handful built later in the 1950s. Worst of all, we are actually getting rid of some dams to satisfy the utterly insane theory that's at the heart of this crazy Communism.

Fran: Getting rid of dams? Why in the everloving name of God would you want to waste all that work and deprive the country of free energy??? Well, I don't mean you, because you obviously know it's wrong, but the people in your time?

Pol: Oh lord, you're not going to believe this. You've somehow understood my time-traveling, but you won't be able to absorb this.

Fran: Try me.

Pol: They want to eliminate the dams because they think the fish are more important than the people.

Fran: That's crazy all right.

Pol: It's a primitive religion, something like the old Incas or Mayas, whatever those South American savages were called. This religion considers the earth to be a goddess, and ultimately wants to sacrifice all people to the goddess. Most of our politicians and most of our churches and educators have signed on to the belief, and they treat anyone who disbelieves as crazy.

Fran: Weirder and weirder. Does this savage cult have churches?

Pol: Doesn't need any. All the main churches preach it, though I'm pretty sure the regular believers don't know where it's taking them.

= = = =

Continued here..........
  ¶ 7:41 AM

  Utterly missed the point
This somehow marks the final bottoming-out of our bizarrely trivial political discussion. After Rush had spent most of his show repeating over and over and over and over again that Obama is diabolical, even risking a mutiny by Snerdley who clearly didn't approve of the word-game, he took a call from an older black woman (Miriam?) who was trying to steer him back toward substantial subjects. The woman complained that Rush (and the other side as well) are spending all their time on trivial junk like asking X to condemn statement Y by spokesman Z. She said that Americans are "hurting", and we need to be asking the candidates what they will do as President instead of quibbling about who failed to condemn the lack of condemnation of the failure to say "How dare you".

Rush then dismissed Miriam as "speaking female talk".

No. Exactly not. Diametrically not.

In fact Rush is doing the female thing: endless quoting of quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, endless complaints about the tone of statements and complaints about the tone of other complaints about the tone of statements.

Miriam was attempting to bring the discussion back into male territory: WHAT WILL THE DAMNED CANDIDATES DO?
  ¶ 11:29 AM