Geek blogger Laura June bewails what we’ll call Documentation Syndrome:

Social networks like Twitter have nudged us in this direction — anyone who uses the service as much as I do has surely noticed the odd phenomenon of watching people at an event or watching an awards show, and feeling as if the people Tweeting as they experience are not experiencing in the traditional sense: they are sharing as they experience the experience, which in turn alters the experience.

Welcome to our childhood. And maybe yours.

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Herman Cain’s victory in the Florida Straw Poll is, in itself, meaningless. Like its Iowa counterpart, the Florida scheme is pay-to-play — it doesn’t tell you anything about a candidate’s electoral support. What it reveals, at most, is a candidate’s financial and organizational cojones.

Still, it’s not good for your Indomitability Narrative if you can’t even buy a fake election. Mitt Romney wasn’t even in town for the fake ballot — a clever dodge — and the fake vote is being read mainly as Rick Perry’s failure to triumph. Cain didn’t so much capture hearts and minds as provide safe harbor for a protest vote — aided on the sly by Mitt’s bucks, it’s being rumored.

But with so many also-rans to choose from, why Herman Cain? Dunno. And, for present purposes, we don’t care to overthink it.

Rather, let us observe that on this day of Our Lord, September Twenty-Six, Two Thousand Eleven, it was at least conceivable — not plausible, but conceivable — that of the two major-party candidates for Preznit of These United States, only one of their four parents would be Caucasian.

We’re not big on American Exceptionalism. But that would definitely be exceptional for America.

You’re right. It’s a trick question.

The Management would like to thank Media Matters for providing a soft target after The Management was subdued by four beers during Thursday night’s Republican Preznidential Debate. The Management would also like to thank Apple for programming an adaptive iPad spellcheck function that now suggests “Preznidential” after finger-stabbing only a few characters. Suck on that, Android.

[via Political Correction]

It was probably 1982 when we had the conversation with the McMinnville school superintendent. We were reporting for the local rag, but the conversation wasn’t professional — at least not the line we still remember clearly three decades on:

“The Sixties were an aberration.”

The superintendent was in his forties, maybe fifty. We were 23.

What gave rise to the line is lost to memory, but we were probably discussing some social issue of the day. And we — personally — probably expressed some form of shock at an unpleasant turn of events: But Americans aren’t like that!

Based on our experience, of course. Which, conveniently for our perspective, began in 1959.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW2VW-Z1M94

One of the rules of thumb we’ve developed since we fell into this bottomless pit of blogging three years ago is Always double-check ThinkProgress transcripts. We’re all for afflicting the comfortable, but TP has a nasty habit of being too, um, enthusiastic in their mission. There’s plenty of outrage to go around without sexing up the dossier.

But Monday afternoon, we were asleep at the switch:

HOW THE OTHER TWO PERCENT LIVES…

“By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.” –Louisiana GOP Congresscritter John Fleming, adding that “class warfare has never created a job”. [ThinkProgress]

This was, how you say, not quite right. The sentence doesn’t end where ThinkProgress ended it:

“The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million,” Fleming said. “So by the time I feed my family I have maybe $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations…”

That version of the quote is from TPM, which went with the implied $200,000 in Fleming’s family food budget.

But even that is misleading. In fact, of everybody who decided to run with that quote, the only reasonable voice was Fleming himself.

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The tragic irony of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is that it was supposed to be an improvement. After Groovy Bill won the election — we saw him play sax at a Mac Court rally in Eugene, although he failed to demonstrate for the assembled stoners How Not to Inhale — he grandly instructed the Secretary of Defense to prepare for ending gay discrimination in the military.

And then it all blew up in his face.

What followed was not unlike Hillary joking that she was too butch career-minded to bake cookies, then hastily calling a photo op to prove she could tollhouse with the best of them. Rather than stand by principle, Bubba mounted a strategic retreat and not-so-grandly declared that if gays would be so kind to stay in the closet, he promised nobody would throw open any doors.

Fourteen thousand doors pried open later, here we are.

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Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman is worried about The Preznit’s prospects next year:

But there is good news for the president. I checked the Constitution, and he is under no compulsion to run for re-election. He can scrap the campaign, bag the fundraising calls and never watch another Republican debate as long as he’s willing to vacate the premises by Jan. 20, 2013.

Goodness! If such a staunch Obama partisan as Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman is recommending quitting—

Hold on, the Producer is screaming in our earwig. Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman is a conservative? Then why would Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman want Obama not to—

Ohhhhhhhhh.

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