Bookworm Room

Barbara Boxer was in Marin County, her home base, to shill her book.  Because the woman, although gifted with a strong feral intelligence that has enabled her to become very powerful, is not very bright, she probably missed how funny (as in foolish) her self-aggrandizing remarks were (emphasis mine):

For U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, politics rarely takes a night off, even when she’s trying to tout her fledgling career as a novelist.

At a promotional appearance Wednesday night at Book Passage in Corte Madera for her second novel, “Blind Trust,” the former Marin County supervisor explained her passion for writing, the process she uses to pen her stories, and the similarities between the characters in her books and those she interacts with in the U.S. Capitol.

But there was no escaping the swarm of dozens of protesters outside waving signs, shouting and banging on the windows, hoping to get Boxer’s attention in the ongoing debate over healthcare reform. In explaining her protagonist’s attempts to defend herself amidst a scandal over a blind trust’s investments, Boxer said, “As someone who has been the target of these kinds of things in my lifetime …”

She was interrupted by a resounding chant of “Boo!” from outside the book store.

“That was perfect timing,” Boxer said. “I now understand how it all works and I am not afraid of them.”

Earlier, when a protester banged on the window as she was speaking, Boxer said, “It takes a certain type of person to be able to deal with this kind of thing.”

[snip]

Rosemary Garvey of Novato said she was upset that Boxer was appearing in Marin to promote her book but was not hosting a public event to hear from residents about healthcare.

“She does represent us and we would like to be heard,” Garvey said. “We see something like this, where she’s appearing to sell her book and it’s despicable. We just want an audience.“

Boiled down to their essentials, Barbara Boxer’s self-lauded  understanding and courage translate into hiding from her constituents.

Charles Martel has a good description of yesterday’s events:

Back from Babette’s Feast.

Sorry to say, I didn’t go inside to watch Babs. The bookstore owners decreed that unless you bought her book you couldn’t sit in on the love fest.

There are things that even I, a simple Christianized Frankish semi-barbarian warrior king cannot bring himself to do, and buying a book by Barbara Boxer is one of them.

So I stayed outside where there were dueling picket signs—some in favor of the public option and about three times more opposed to it. There were occasional tense moments as people tried out their arguments on each other, but things were actually surprisingly civil. The leftists were waiting for us to break out in shouts, screams and the Horst Wessel Lied, but we continued with our perplexing soft-spoken ways.

(One woman, clearly a loon, had both sides confused as to where she belonged until she yelled out, “Single payer! Single payer!” One of the leftist pickets then rolled his eyes and said loud enough for us to hear, “Oh, crap, that means we have to claim her as one of ours.”)

A guy I know from Marin named Ed, who used to be involved heavily involved in the local GOP, got into a verbal tussle with a bearded leftist who apparently thought that the way to talk Ed and his ilk out of doing vulgar Townhallish things was to call him a moron.

I interrupted the contretemps to tell him that “Ed here is Jesuit-trained, and you know what that means.” The guy look confused, so I continued, “It means he’s schooled in logic, a tool we fascists use to convert the unsuspecting. You should thank God you’re immune to it.”

That was about the highlight of any confrontations I had with anybody. I talked to a former Coast Guard guy who was a leftist, but I saw that he was deeply troubled by some things the statists are doing. He was impressed that when he pulled put that old chestnut about “racism is on the rise because right-wing militias are gaining recruits,” I pointed out that the latest FBI figures for KKK/militia types nationwide is about 20,000. “If you do the math, in a nation of 300 million people, 20,000 amounts to one in every 15,000 Americans. It’s kind of hard to lose sleep over numbers like that.”

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