Stephen challenges Steele to a battle.
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A couple things. Bling is the corniest fucking word in the English language, and people really need to stop using it. It hasn’t been cool since Cash Money popularized a decade ago. I flipped open the New York Times recently and saw the phrase in ad for one of those luxury retailers that sells $2,000 chunky cases. If the Upper East Side is throwing it around, it’s over. Please. Stop. Now.
More Steele nonsense, from his appearance on Curtis Sliwa’s radio show.
SLIWA: Now, using a little bit of that street terminology, are you giving him any Slum love, Michael?
STEELE: (laughter)
SLIWA: Because he is — when guys look at him and young women look at him — they say oh, that’s the slumdog millionaire, governor. So, give me some slum love.
STEELE: I love it. (inaudible) … some slum love out to my buddy. Gov. Bobby Jindal is doing a friggin’ awesome job in his state. He’s really turned around on some core principles — like hey, government ought not be corrupt. The good stuff … the easy stuff.
Larison responds.
What is Steele’s target audience when he talks like this? It can’t be American desis, that much is certain. I mean, Jindal’s mother is a Punjabi nuclear physicist, and he was a Rhodes scholar who studied at Oxford. No one would confuse him for someone who grew up in the slums of Mumbai. The success of Jindal’s parents and Jindal’s own success have nothing to do with the sort of random luck of Slumdog Millionaire’s main character, but when presented with a chance to say that Steele opts to endorse this “slum love” nonsense. It’s bad enough when Republicans practice the phony populism of pretending to be a down-home country boy when they are, in fact, well-heeled lawyers and lobbyists who live at the Watergate, or when they valorize politicians for knowing less than they should, but are they so out of it that one of their leaders talks about one of their smartest, best-educated elected officials like this?
