|
|||
|
Before I get started, let me first note that one brave newspaper didn’t take the easy out of endorsing one or the other major presidential candidates: the Ann Arbor News flipped them both off. A paper after my own heart in a town I learned to love long, long ago. Except for the weather. . . . → Read More: U.S. gives JP Morgan $25 billion, JP Morgan says thanks, screw you I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I . . . → Read More: Genocide: crime against humanity or diplomacy by other means? I write something pretty good on Monday, drew quite a bit of traffic albeit none generous enough to comment on it, but I remember very little of the piece or the process. Since then my condition has lost more luster and I’m starting to look, rhetorically speaking, like liver left on the counter so . . . → Read More: In which we are beaten with mallets and left for dull. I can’t actually believe someone is talking about Peggy Noonan winning a Pulitzer, but apparently my capacity for belief falls short of reality, because they are. They being a former colleague of Noonan’s at the Wall Street Journal, and Brian Williams, the managing editor of NBC Nightly News who is paid more than $10 million annually for his good news judgement. NBC should get about $9 million back on general principles and the other mil specifically for this Noonan crap. Noonan, once a writer for Ronald Reagan, represents a political philosophy that is nasty, brutish, and, in the minds of most reasonable Americans, discredited. The worshipful Tunku Varadarajan, the former colleague writing in Forbes, tells us that sure, the Noonster “erred occasionally in judgment in the early years of the Bush administration” — a polite way of saying that her lips were as limpets on Bush’s flight suit — but that now, “she is writing with such transparent conscience that I believe that she captures, in her column, the American condition and the American voice.” Imagine that: a wealthy, conservative worshipper at the feet of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush represents the American condition. A McCain supporter represents the American voice (a claim for which we’ll have empirical proof before the awards are chosen). We must all be in better shape and happier than one would guess from appearances. And “transparent conscience?” Gaaa? Continue reading Why Peggy Noonan will no way no how win a Pulitzer Prize I have a hat that I call my Gilligan hat, which I often wear in tandem with some dark sunglasses. The past week or so people have been staring at me. No, really: it has gotten to the point where I’m checking to see if my fly is open or I’m drooling or bleeding or otherwise making myself obvious. But no: they’re just looking at me. I don’t get it. Is there some me-looking twerp on a reality show lately? Particularly unsettling were a pair of pre-teen girls, outside Fred Segal in Santa Monica, who just outright gaped at me with their braces looking like Cuisinart blades and who made me wonder about a television resemblance, since Fred’s is known for the occasional celebrity sighting. But I look neither like a movie star nor a complete derelict nor like anyone, really, who would warrant being stared at on the sidewalk outside Fred Segal or anywhere else; not handsome, not ugly, especially; just a guy. It’s freakin’ me out, man. Stop it. Meanwhile, the meatier point to this post is that a Nieman Watchdog panel has discovered that the press were afraid to challenge the putative president and his administration during the runup to the invasion of Iraq. Shocking. Even more shocking than the revelation that most journalists were willing to let George Bush and the Bush administration get by with about anything, is that the panel consists almost entirely of journalists who didn’t roll over; the ones who did are still in denial about it. Continue reading They’re staring at me. No, really. Plus, “now there’s a shock!” Well really, this is a bit much: Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine quotes an Iowa preacher begging McCain’s God to stomp the deities of Obama supporters. Well actually not so much begging as threatening: if God doesn’t get McCain elected, then bad things will happen to God. Never mind Joe the Plumber’s concerns about . . . → Read More: Preacher tries to blackmail God into supporting McCain; results in doubt Someone somewhere asked if the wrecked economy would be George W. Bush’s last gasp as president. The answer is, naturally, no: the one rule that best describes the Bush administration, one that we’ve articulated often, is that no matter how bad what we know they’ve done may be, there’s worse to come. Bush and Dick Cheney and their to this point unindicted co-conspirators are in office until January 20 of 2009, and they’re perfectly capable of doing something awful on January 19. Death, taxes, and these malignant clowns acting up. As usual we declined to watch the presidential debate, but we’re given to understand by many, many sources that the smart engaging fellow prevailed over the snarling mediocrity. Oorah. What intrigued us was that after hearing about an exchange regarding Joe the Plumber, we were shown that Joe is an actual person, albeit not an exceedingly bright one. Apparently he thinks Obama’s tax plan prohibits him from buying a business, or some such thing, for reasons the details of which I missed. This morning, when we were force-fed some TV with breakfast, we saw Joe the Plumber declaring that he made his choice in the current contest some time ago, based upon his conviction that the US should remain a democracy instead of giving itself over to socialism. Or Socialism, more probably. Continue reading Is the economy Bush’s parting gift? No: there’s always worse to come Well that was interesting. The Junior League treated us to dinner at the Buca di Beppo store in Santa Monica. If you’ve not eaten at Buca di Beppo, it’s a mid-scale Italian-themed chain that hasn’t succumbed to the please everyone imperative, or at least not on each dish. We had a nice salad, penne pasta, and lemon chicken, which were good, okay and good, respectively. Because many of those in attendance are recovering alcoholics, we didn’t get to choose a price-appropriate wine. Or any other kind. I sat next to a Junior Leaguer whose name I am somewhat embarrassed to say I can’t remember, since we spent the better part of an hour talking, which is to say I kept her talking, which is what I do when I want to seem social but don’t want to risk talking myself, which is most of the time. My conversational partner grew up in Oklahoma, went to college in Hawaii for a year, which she liked and I don’t know why she cut short, went back to Oklahoma (Norman) to finish up her undergraduate degree, got her masters (MBA) at UC Irvine, works in a bank and volunteers for the Junior League — six years, which puts her near the point of becoming a Senior Leaguer — and an organization dealing with urban youths. Continue reading My dinner with the Los Angeles Junior League Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s single-shoulder-shrug of an effort in 1996, McCain remains in contention for next month’s election. By which I mean he is still alive and not too embarrassed to show himself in public, the latter of which shouldn’t be any surprise because Republicans, and indeed most Democrats as well, have long since evolved beyond shame, or devolved as your perspective may demand. Even by that low standard, and even with a crisis both tailor-made and tailor-timed for presidential-candidate posturing, he’s just barely squeaking by, and my prediction that he’ll be lucky to crack 45% in the general election is looking better than it has in some time (and definitely better than my immediate but still salvageable prediction about the Dow). I say this because I sense that there remain doubters out there about McCain’s capacity to make things in this country, and thereby globally, so much worse that voters will flock to some new and presumably (presumed by me) better, pinkish banner. I think we’ve seen during the course of the campaign enough evidence of his capacity, full stop, to recognize that he is both incapable of running the country in any recognizable meaning of “run,” and that he is a very angry and petulant man who would not take well to being run, which would essentially leave no one running the country. Maybe, some cynics will say, having no one running the country wouldn’t be such a bad thing? Why, no: that’s the sort of thing that lunatic government-hating freaks of the kind who have actually been running the country during the George W. Bush years say, and we don’t want to sound like them, now do we? No, or at least I don’t, or at least not on purpose, or at least not on purpose without some satiric intent. It’s a big country and it needs to be run even if that’s into the ground, because otherwise we’ll all fall beyond the event horizon. Continue reading **Now** do you think McCain could bring on the revolution? Excuse us if we doubt that the housing bubble is solely responsible for Armageddon. And indulge us as we point out that a few weeks ago, when the Dow was sitting above 11,000, we bet that it would soon see the wrong side of 8000, a benchmark toward which it has obligingly slid. (Full . . . → Read More: Ha ha! We laugh at your puny global financial chaos! |
|
||
|
Copyright © 2012 BTC News: If It Says ‘News,’ It Must Be True - All Rights Reserved |
|||
