Welcome to Jim's Relentless Season of Incessant Book Promotion
This is it! The official publication day for Heavy Lifting. Today is the day the good folks at Regnery are encouraging everyone to buy the book, hoping to boost its Amazon ranking. (At this point, if you have Amazon Prime, you can get the book for almost 40 percent off the cover price.) 
Cam and I wanted to dispel the biggest lie that young men are told today, the notion that growing up, getting married, and having kids are terrible burdens that tie you down and limit you. They're actually what make life worth living. We get together about once a week when he's in this neck of the woods, and one of our recurring topics of conversation is the phenomenon of young men, and sometimes not-so-young men, "failing to launch" -- living with their parents, not getting real jobs or a career path, not getting married, not having kids -- basically, living in an extended adolescence. Cam and I both just passed 40, and we'd say that all of these steps, particularly our wives and children, are the most fulfilling, most important, and best things we've ever done. Neither one of us would hold ourselves up as perfect -- we both had our stumbles along the way -- but we're both certain that this is what we're meant to do with our lives. We have this strange phenomenon of what were once common, almost required rites of passage becoming rarer and almost optional. Very smart people such as Helen Smith and Kay Hymowitz have written about this from an academic perspective, but Cam and I felt a need to showcase the upside of growing up and being a grown man, why you should want to be married, a father, a hard worker, and a good neighbor. Our culture has been in this recurring state of rebellion against the Ward Cleaver image, when in fact the world needs an updated version of that masculine image -- dependable, reliable, at home with his place in the world. We take a long tour through some of modern family life's odder corners, such as when you have to put down the video games, where Mitt Romney and Fifty Cent agree on career advice, feeling like a crash-test dummy when you ask a girl out, the insanity of the garter-belt tradition at weddings, how to handle strangers asking to rub your wife's pregnant belly, Lamaze class, the traumatic flashbacks of Back to School Night, the Kafkaesque process of buying and selling a home, and so on. In some ways, this is one of the most socially conservative things I've ever written, but it's not really a polemic or about the political topics we usually associate with social conservatism. It's about what a man is supposed to do with his life, and what's most important, and why family is what's at the heart of us. In the middle of all of these funny stories, Cam and I share some very personal, heartfelt stories about how we've gotten through our most painful moments in life. I was impressed that Cam, my best friend, could write with such raw honesty about some of the tough times in his marriage. I wrote about a time in my early 20s when I was drinking far too much, too often, and what got me out of that hole. I also wrote for the first time about the difficult pregnancy of our second son and what was undoubtedly the worst moment of my life, being told that he might not make it. (Everything did turn out fine.) The lesson you take from the most difficult moments in your life is that they put everything into perspective, and force you to focus upon what really matters most to you. I'm tentatively scheduled to talk about the book with Laura Ingraham this morning around 11:30 Eastern, and on the Vicki McKenna show around 4 p.m. Cam will be on the Bob Dutko show around 1 p.m. Hillary Clinton: Idioms with the Word 'Shouting' Are Sexist, You Know Look out! Microaggression! Bernie Sanders criticized the "shouting" from both sides on gun issues in the first Democratic presidential debate. Clinton said Saturday in Iowa that Sanders' remarks came with a gender-related undercurrent. She said: "I'm not shouting. It's just that when women talk, some people think we're shouting." Man, does she love to play the victim card. Does anybody want to run to be the next actual president? Not just going through the motions and griping about how the moderators weren't fair to you, or whining about how there are "a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me"? For what it's worth, Sanders isn't about to let Hillary suggest that he somehow wronged her. Sanders on Sunday laughed at her suggestion that his remarks were about gender. "All that I can say is I am very proud of my record on women's issues. I certainly do not have a problem with women speaking out -- and I think what the secretary is doing there is taking words and misapplying them," Sanders told Tapper. "What I would say is if we are going to make some progress in dealing with these horrific massacres that we're seeing, is that people have got to start all over this country talking to each other," he said. "It's not Hillary Clinton. You have some people who are shouting at other people all across this country. You know that. This nation is divided on this issue." Hillary should have just said that Bernie Sanders is last man in America who should criticize anybody else for shouting. 
That IS his indoor voice. Biden: Oh, That Heartbreaking Anecdote in Dowd's Column? Never Happened. Okay, somebody's lying. Vice President Joe Biden, last night on 60 Minutes: You're being very polite the way you're asking me the question because some people have written that, you know, Beau on his death bed said, "Dad, you've got to run," and, there was this sort of Hollywood moment that, you know, nothing like that ever, ever happened. Beau from the time he was in his 30s -- or actually his late 20s -- was my, he and Hunter were one of my two most reliable advisers. And, Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win. But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, "Dad, you've got to run, like, win one for the Gipper." It wasn't anything like that. Maureen Dowd, writing in her column, August 1: Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values. Hunter also pushed his father, telling him, "Dad, it's who you are." Politico, October 6: "According to multiple sources, it was Biden himself who talked to her, painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau's face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because 'the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.'" Occam's Razor: It is easier for one person to lie than for multiple people to get together and coordinate a lie. ADDENDA: The best part of speaking at the Heritage Foundation is that they give you an Ed Meese Bobble-Head Doll. Ed Meese was a longtime ally of Ronald Reagan, was Attorney General from 1985 to 1988, and he is chairman of Heritage's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. 
And now he nods in approval to everything I say! | 
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