Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" Washington Times More Desperate Truths from the Corn-pone Canoodler of i600 Pennsylvania Avenue: "The central lesson I have learned in three years as your president is that we...
...Professor McCloskey was divorced in November from Joanne McCloskey, a professor of nursing at Iowa and his wife of 30 years...
...These rationalizations about too many deer doing so much damage—give me a break...
...Perhaps it's time for me and my fellow bad spellers to take the offensive...
...said Kyle, who is a practicing attorney and a moderate Republican...
...I believe they have the right to regulate their own populations on the precious little land we humans have left them...
...Oh, Steve, Steve, let us all grieve...
...It's not every author who must interrupt a book tour in order to testify before a grand jury...
...The party is dominated by characters like Phil Gramm, Pat Buchanan, Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Alfonse D'Amato...
...Since then, he has had facial surgery and undergone a procedure to alter his voice...
...For the record, I am loo percent against it—here or anywhere...
...During a recent telephone interview, Kyle told PW that she was motivated to novelize and publish her journal shortly after Clinton's 12-year affair with Gennifer Flowers was made public...
...Animals are part of my family as much as any human...
...Clinton has forced into the open the kind of issues—ideals and ethics—that will be at the heart of the presidential campaign that has just begun...
...It's anybody's guess where the voters will lurch next...
...Titled Purposes of the Heart—and written originally as a "therapeutic" journal during her many years in group therapy—Kyle's novel thinly veils her alleged nearly lifelong affair with President Clinton, whom she says she has known and "loved on and off" since they first met when they were preteens growing up in Hot Springs, Ark...
...My real bugbear is vowels...
...from Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, by Stanley Fish, Oxford University Press, $19.95—overpriced] New York Times How our liberals produce the Kultursmog: Another fatuous statist from the Old Order assumes room temperature and his genius is solemnized on the front page of one of the Kultursmog's most offensive smoke stacks...
...Most of my spelling flubs can be traced to three idiosyncrasies of English...
...FEBRUARY 16, 1996] 80 April 1996 • The American Spectator The Great Books Series Proof from the quill of Prof...
...This month, Kyle's agent, Lucianne Goldberg, will begin shopping around a bombshell roman a clef that could knock Primary Colors right out of the headlines...
...Small children run at the first sight of them...
...I expected to lose my job," says Ms...
...FEBRUARY 18, 1996] Publishers Weekly The unconscionable buildup of yet another wholly fictive account of the private life of the most widely maligned president since Grover Cleveland: News of her existence first surfaced a few months back in an item that ran in Esquire, but Dolly Kyle of Dallas, Tex., is ready to go public in a big way via the book business...assuming, that is, that a publisher bites...
...Moreover, the Great Man's departure from politics is presented as an unfortunate accident of history ("a growing conservative mood," "divisiveness within his own party"), a tragedy in which an obscure figure — "a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan" — played some obscure part: BEVERIY HILLS, CALIF., Feb...
...Their last encounter, which kicks off the book, was in 1994 at their 3oth high school reunion...
...Next would come a sex-change operation, but Professor McCloskey is unsure whether he will take that step...
...Apple, Jr., on the front page of America's newspaper of record, awards former Secretary of Education Alexander another cabinet post, perhaps in acknowledgment of the great man's campaign walks: Not that the candidates are ever shy about claiming victory...
...Life in the White House—that's his goal...
...When was the last time a deer abused a child or got drunk or killed someone...
...I'm not the first to protest the madness...
...FEBRUARY 7,1996] Newsweek Jennifer Lynn Weston, lucky not to have been born Chinese: There's a little computer-printed sign tacked above my desk that says, "Being a Bad Speller Is Not a Moral Failing...
...These are the best of the Republican group, Cut those taxes, make the rich folk whoop, Punish the poor and water the soup, And look at the rest of the Republican group...
...Still, she says, the response she has received from a profession not known for its unconventionality has been overwhelmingly positive...
...FEBRUARY 12, 1996] New York Times Columnist Bob Herbert again sounding like a reject from the Times correspondence page: You have to wonder about the Republicans...
...McCloskey, who has been a professor of economics and history at the University of Iowa since 1980...
...Dole, Dole, merry old Dole...
...Doktor Stanley Fish (no joke) that further cutbacks in higher education could be highly beneficial to the Republic's mental health: Being sequestered in the academy has its advantages as well as its liabilities...
...And Forbes, Steve, let us all grieve, Has more money than you can believe, His tax proposals make you want to just heave...
...17—Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, the former Governor of California who fathered the state's modern economic boom with expansive government programs to build freeways, vast water systems and public universities open to all at low cost, died on Friday at his home here...
...And Dole, Dole, merry old Dole, Wants to take on the presidential role...
...A television interviewer grilled her recently on the scandals plaguing her presidency...
...Have you ever asked yourself why such a very small percentage of people bully the majority into accepting that it is their right to kill...
...And just as Clinton is calling for Americans to rethink their priorities, she's getting her own lesson in what's uppermost in the public's mind...
...In the staid world of economics, the transformation of one of its well-known members has stunned the profession...
...I've a natural tendency to try to spell words the way they sound...
...MARCH 1, 1996] The American Spectator • April 19 9 6 81...
...Brown, a Democrat, served two terms as Governor, from 1959 until 1967, turning back a challenge from former Vice President Richard M. Nixon in 1962...
...Then, he concluded, "let's talk about those disadvantaged children for a couple of seconds...
...many who wished for increased public attention to their labours got it in the past few years of the right-wing backlash and found that, rather than bringing respect and influence, it brought danger and the elimination of progressive programmes...
...The burly and ebullient Mr...
...Why don't we have open season on humans since they are overpopulating the entire earth, cause traffic accidents and destroy entire forests...
...FEBRUARY 9, 1996] Washington Post The sad plight of an American he-man in this, the twilight of the Sexual Revolution: My husband feels and rearranges his private parts in public...
...The Republicans could win with a candidate who is cheerful, moderate and willing to exhibit a dollop of compassion...
...He refuses...
...If we do, there is no stopping us—the best is yet to come and your future will be the glory of all American history...
...At a meeting of the American Economic Association last month, Deirdre McCloskey caused a stir when she appeared on several panels wearing a red dress and a blonde wig...
...I've pleaded and begged him to go to the restroom for this...
...He was 90...
...FEBRUARY 2, 1996] San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle More dirty tricks — a Republican attack team smuggles idiotic poesy onto the correspondence page of a great American Sunday gazette in another attempt to portray the children of Eleanor Roosevelt as mental defectives: Notes on the Republican Primary Hopefuls —1996 There's Newt, Newt, rooty-toot-toot, All dressed up in his Republican suit, About you and me —doesn't give a hoot...
...Names, dates, and places have been changed in her book (Hillary's character is named Mallory Cheatum) to "protect the guilty...
...FEBRUARY 5, 1996] New York Times R.W...
...FEBRUARY 13, 1996] Chronicle of Higher Education The crafty Professor Donald N. McCloskey of the University of Iowa demonstrates a simple low-cost way for the menfolk to maintain their faculty positions at a great cow college in these historic days of affirmative action: Just a few days after Donald N. McCloskey began the process of becoming a woman, female academics welcomed the prominent economist as one of their own...
...Maybe they should draft Bill Clinton...
...FEBRUARY 18, 1996] Toronto Globe & Mail More blubber-blubber-blubber from HRC's claque: The timing of the book is exquisite...
...Newt, Newt, rooty-toot-toot...
...At a meeting of the Social Science History Association last November, a small group of women threw a dinner party for Professor McCloskey, with toasts to his decision to change his gender and pink balloons that proclaimed, "It's a Girl...
...Please advise me how to prevent more shocks, humiliations and desperately unhappy incidents of this nature...
...outraged, she had apparently assumed that she was the only "serious" other woman in his life...
...it's not every witness who is asked by a grand juror to autograph her book...
...He now prefers to be known as a she, and is taking female hormones and wearing dresses and skirts instead of suits and ties...
...Perhaps it is not so bad a thing after all that in the United States those who operate the levers of commerce and government do not give much heed to what goes on in our classrooms or in our learned journals...
...Tonight Senator Bob Dole, Patrick J. Buchanan and Lamar Alexander, the former Transportation Secretary...
...And that's how I feel, thank you very much...
...I put it there as a reminder to myself, more than anyone else, for I'm still in the process of putting my "failing" into perspective...
...I was prepared to move to Spokane and become a secretary in a grain elevator, but I didn't have to...
...But a growing conservative mood and divisiveness within his own party over student unrest and the Vietnam War led to his defeat by a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, in 1966...
...A combination of genetic and environmental factors accounts for my difficulties...
...That week, Donald McCloskey legally changed his first name to Deirdre...
...JANUARY 28, 1996] Vashon—Maury Island Beachcomber (Vashon, Washington) On the correspondence page of a leading organ of advanced thought, Miss Katrin Fletter raises the furry flag of animalism: I am sorry, but I am really annoyed at all the "oh so careful" language protecting a person's right to hunt...
...When they gallop across the national landscape they remind you of the Wild Bunch...
...From what region of exceedingly bad karma did they recruit their latest crop of Presidential candidates and Congressional leaders...
...And I was born among a people who speak English, a notoriously nonphonetic tongue...
...Have you ever wondered why it's mostly men who hunt...
...CURRENT WISDOM Washington Times More Desperate Truths from the Corn-pone Canoodler of i600 Pennsylvania Avenue: "The central lesson I have learned in three years as your president is that we desperately, desperately, desperately have to face the fact that we must go forward together...
...You couldn't extract a half-pint of compassion from the entire assemblage...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
