Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Chicago Sun-Times In analyzing Hollywood art for the film critic Roger Ebert, President Bill Clinton reveals how far his taste in pulchritude has advanced since the fair Monica and...
...McCain is a good man...
...Among the various actors given credit no one mentioned the working people whose real wages have gone down in the past two decades, conveniently (for those profiting from the boom) lowering labor costs...
...FEBRUARY 15, 2000] The Weekly (Monterey County, California) Taking exception to this famed weekly's picture of a gun-wielding gal, a life-long opponent of the NRA's hellish plots goes into a humanistic frenzy with intent to educate: Perhaps I should just come down to your offices and unleash a storm of bullets, randomly gunning down your staff, splattering blood and bits of human tissue on the walls, laughing as you dive terrified under your desks...
...from The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, St...
...They at least hung around until their humor potential was pretty well exhausted...
...And that Jerry Thompson, The Tennessean columnist who recently died of cancer: What a man, but I'm sure he was a Democrat...
...Along the way, he encountered a screwball right-wing revolution that culminated in a drive for his impeachment—and he basically gave Newt Gingrich and company enough rope to hang themselves...
...FEBRUARY 21, 2000] Los Angeles Times A Mr...
...Beyond that Toobin does not go, but he might have without getting any argument from me...
...For one thing, it's sort of funny...
...She disliked their boozing and womanizing most of all...
...Bang...
...Whatever the president's sins, Toobin says, they did not include anything like the greed, hatred and vindictiveness of those who tried to destroy him...
...Clinton is no liberal crusader, but he is an extremely effective, if opportunistic, man of the center who pulled the country back from the fringes of political madness, erased the deficit and reasserted the U.S...
...A lot of ridiculousness has leaked out of the campaign over the last few days, as people like Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer and Orrin Hatch trotted off into the sunset...
...Which is, of course, comic relief...
...The president caught hell for that speech...
...FEBRUARY 27, 2000] The Great Books Series An invitation to tedium from the naughty girl of dirt-under-the-nails populism, Molly Ivins, on the very first page of her new biography of George W. Bush...
...If not, that's OK, too...
...He had a vicarious enjoyment of the good old boy games," she said...
...If only he were a Democrat...
...Clinton has been a great president...
...Robert Scheer presents a cartoon in romantic strokes: C'mon...
...Bang bang bang...
...But in terms of reproduction, the answer is probably no...
...It was said he wasn't sorry enough and he didn't apologize enough...
...from Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Random House, 178 pages, $19.95] Self-described as a "uniter, not a divider," -MORGAN CHRISTOPHER Bush has managed to unite the Christian Monterey right, homophobes, zealous antiabortionists, [FEBRUARY 10-16, 2000] The American Spectator • April 2000 69...
...And on the relationship front, instead of investing in traditional, high-risk marriages, people will contract with partners on a short-term, nohard-feelings basis—with renewals available if all goes well...
...Jeffrey] Toobin, it must be said, kind of backs into this bow of respect...
...Carter said...
...Bogart is fabulous in it and Bergman brings tears to your eyes...
...FEBRUARY 13, 2000] New York Times The Jimmy Carter of the historic Playboy interview gets hornier with age: They have been married for 53 years and, Mr...
...That is enough to justify calling him a great, if imperfect, president...
...Carter writes in "The Virtues of Aging," they are closer than ever...
...Oh, c'mon...It's just a harmless joke...
...He picked good advisers such as Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretaries Bob Rubin and Larry Summers and listened to their counsel...
...No sex, no drugs, no Siggie Freud—so why would anyone read it...
...I mean, I still can't watch the movie without saying, `God I wish I'd known that woman...
...Wright sometimes thought he had a compulsive need to be accepted that stemmed from childhood insecurities...
...Now, well past 7o, Rosalynn and I have learned to accommodate each other's desires more accurately and generously, and have never had a more complete and enjoyable relationship...
...His is the envy of the baby boomers toward one of their own who is simply superior at playing the power games they were raised to master...
...Looking back, what strikes me most is the sheer grit it must have taken simply to live through that time, and the fact that the only really clear and pointed defense of Clinton's human right to privacy came from the president himself— in August 1998, at the end of a speech confessing he had not told the full truth...
...Get it...
...They, whose personal lives tend to be as messy as any, seem frustrated that the president's is intact, despite the slings of scandal...
...CURRENT WISDOM Chicago Sun-Times In analyzing Hollywood art for the film critic Roger Ebert, President Bill Clinton reveals how far his taste in pulchritude has advanced since the fair Monica and the commencement of his weekly therapy sessions with the three Christian swamis: "Casablanca": "It's a story about love and honor and courage—the stuff that people care about...
...With the advent of extensive reproductive technology, there will be an ever-diminishing practical need for male-female sexual intercourse...
...He loved locker-room stories...
...FEBRUARY 16, 2000] The Tennessean On the correspondence page of a great gazette from the Volunteer State, still more proof that for many troubled Americanoes politics is a coping mechanism: Congratulations to Al Gore and also John McCain...
...Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Strom Thurmond and, it has to be said in fairness, many conventional Republicans, in a coalition so right-wing that should he be elected president, the European Union might treat the United States as it has Austria...
...role as a world peacemaker...
...Trump slipped away so suddenly that we did not even have time to discuss how his hair has come to resemble some sort of artificially flavored dessert topping...
...A Gore-McCain ticket would be a winner...
...Keeping sexually adventurous women away from Bill Clinton had been a staff preoccupation for as long as he had been in public life...
...There's a part of this guy who wanted to be a good old boy and he just never could be...
...But I'll find you cowards hiding, sobbing and shaking, aim at your heads and pull the trigger, again and again, as you scream for mercy and visions of your motherless, fatherless children flash before your eyes...
...Maybe so...
...In a brief section of the book about sexuality among older people, he writes about their relationship...
...Prisoners are not counted, so if the 1985 incarceration rate had held, the current unemployment rate of 4.1 percent would be a less-boomish 4.3 percent [FEBRUARY 21, 2000] New York Times Book Review Whilst reviewing the latest moral testament to our martyred president, Thomas Powers pauses to confer sainthood on the only heir to George Washington ever to be cited for contempt of court and a dreadful tailor: Finally and unexpectedly, there is Clinton himself—"the good guy in this struggle...
...JOE EDMONDSON Clarksville [FEBRUARY 14, 2000] 68 April 2000 • The American Spectator Time Feminist visionary Barbara Ehrenreich provides all the males of tomorrow with hope that their mother-in-law problem can be delayed unto eternity: As long as men're taller than most women, we'll probably keep 'em around for retrieving those hard-to-reach items...
...Labor economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger point out that the proportion of the population behind bars has doubled since 1985...
...But his claim that "even presidents have private lives" seems the one obvious lesson from the whole mess...
...Rosalynn made me tone that down a little," Mr...
...Bang...
...FEBRUARY 3, 2000] The Great Books Series The sad effects of peer-group pressure on the most chaste young fellow ever to pass through Boys' State, wide-eyed, genuine, and prelapsarian: But what had always bothered Betsey Wright most about certain troopers was their bad influence upon Clinton himself...
...Martin's Press, 413 pages, $25.95] The Nation As Reaganite capitalism continues to shine its loveliness on the land, the Nation's gnarled killjoys respond with their customary bathroom noises: Last week, amid self-congratulations all around, the economy celebrated its i.o7th month of continuous growth...
...When I was married at the age of 22 and relishing an active sex life," he writes, "I assumed that this was a pleasure that my middle-aged parents rarely, if ever, enjoyed...
...Their running around carousing at night was driving me crazy, because the stories always came back about how these guys working for the governor were out picking up women in bars...
...FEBRUARY 24, 2000] New York Times More agelastic humor from the comic genius, Gail Collins, the widely respected gourmand: Donald Trump has dropped out of the presidential race...
...Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius presents Official Washington's historic judgment, a Byzantine explanation of the Clinton Renaissance and of the "screwball right-wing revolution" from which the gods rescued us: Clinton stayed out of the way...
...Credit is also due to the burgeoning prison population...
...Now this matter is between me, the two people I love most,my wife and our daughter, and our God," he said...
...This will not have any impact on our actual search for a new chief executive, but it will be a terrible blow to the second-most-important function of a national election...
...FEBRUARY 1, 2000] Washington Post George W. Bush gets a warning shot across the bow from America's foremost anti-Christian, pro-abortion homosexualist Richard Cohen, handsomest man ever to show up on Fire Island: the Rev...
...They exploited his sexual attractiveness to women," Wright said...
...If you make it to her last page you need to have your prescription changed: This book contains no news about the sex life of George W. Bush, nor about the drugs he has ingested, nor about whatever dark psychological demons drive him to seek the presidency of the United States...
...It's nobody's business but ours...
...His wife and daughter, poised for future success, show obvious love and respect for this man...
...Yet Clinton plainly enjoyed the troopers' tales of conquest...
...Why is it so hard for the pundits to give this man his due...
Vol. 33 • April 2000 • No. 3
