Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" On a fabulous pro-Clinton website, the cruelest cut against David Brock yet made: David as John Dean. What next, David as Richard Millions? David Brock's tell-all...
...Thank you...
...June 21, 2002]NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS As the global warming hysteria spreads throughout the Chicken-Little Left, the venerable NYRB suggests desperate measures even for vacationing subscribers: To Americans visiting in Europe, Ice-land recommends itself as a beautiful, friendly, safe [!!!] tourist destination, whose international airport near Reykjavik is at just the right location to interrupt transatlantic flights for a few days, and whose international air-line (Icelandair) is as low-priced as it is reliable...
...And I got an article the other day about this seminar that was held on my presidency, at the University ofArkansas.And one of the alleged academics said I really wasn't very interested in anything...
...And I thought, well, my God, if that's true, I was an abject failure as president...
...What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11...
...if that gets old, blame Ralph Nader...
...this hasn't dented his popularity at home, but has offended him personally...
...Dean's narks the early days of Nixon's vision of a mechanism for dirty tricks to neutralize political enemies—and Brock's chronicles its maturity through the impeachment battles against Bill Clinton and ultimately its success installing George W Bush in the White House...
...Now that I am the epitome of has-been-ness, I spend more time than I used to reading articles in the press...
...And Happy Graduation...
...CURRENT CONSORTIUMNEWS...
...Blame someone else...
...Some supporters who've spoken with him recently suspect he may forgo both a presidential and a Senate re-election race in 2004, bowing out of politics.That would be a double disaster, losing a valuable public servant and a victory for practitioners of personal vilification...
...An encyclopedic policy wonk, an Olympic champion of policy wonks, and given your passion at golf, perhaps you'd prefer the Tiger Woods of policy wonks...
...I came here expecting to get a contact high from you—what a bummer it would be to discover that you are not aflame, that you have managed on this day of days merely to smolder...
...They are blaming your grandparents...
...In that sense, the two "blinded" books by former insiders can be seen as bookends...
...It made me heartsick to contemplate the pain and embarrassment Clinton had brought upon himself, his family and the country...
...July 1, 2002] MEDIAWHORESONLINE...
...Since I could neither fathom the private behavior of Clinton as my friend, nor mitigate the public consequences for him as my boss, I tried my best simply to concentrate on my job...
...COM We knew it, we knew it, we knew it—and Carville-Begala's favorite news source con-firms it: THE SECRET RONALD REAGAN • How Hoover, FBI Manufactured Ronnie's Career • Conservative Icon Exposed As J. Edgar's Puppet • Reagan Hid His Communist, Bircher Ties In an explosive but thus far neglected series based on recently declassified FBI files, the San Francisco Chronicle has uncovered the secret political life of Ronald Reagan...
...After seven months of denials, Clinton went on television and confessed that he had indeed had a "relationship" with Monica Lewinsky...
...maybe it's the beginning of the end of the world, but please, you should not feel personally responsible...
...Clinton responds in kind: Peter G. Peterson: Mr...
...The disclosure that President Bush was warned in August that al Qaeda was seeking to hijack domestic aircraft did not confirm all McKinney's intimations—which extended to talk about how the Bush family might have profited from the attacks.Yet she was freed to stake a claim of vindication...
...May 23, 2002] THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The Reverend Albert R. Hunt, remonstrating against the shocking price his heroes have to pay for promising pie in the sky, his hero being the angelic Senator Tom Daschle (dismissed as Puff by the vilifying Rush Limbaugh): The political right has waged a vitriolic campaign against the South Dakotan and his wife...
...In my mind, one thing, at least, that differentiates you is that you are what one might call a Renaissance policy wonk...
...At least in my personal experience, you know more about more policy areas than any other political leader I've ever known...
...I went for a long and miserable jog through the sticky dog days' air.When I got back to the house, Brooke [Shearer—Mrs...
...June 17, 2002] THE NATION Another unlikely hero is snatched from the lunatic fringe and placed up there in the Liberal Hall of Fame, right next to John F. Kennedy, Alger Hiss and Socks: During the long months of post-September 11 presidential invincibility no member of Congress climbed further out on the whatdid-Bush-know-when limb than Representative Cynthia McKinney...
...WJC: Mr...
...Half of it whips by in a near-ecstasy of classic rock and jaw-dropping skate antics...
...We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11," the Georgia Democrat said in March...
...June 10, 2002] 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 WISDOM THE AMERICAN PROSPECT Crack film critic, James Parker, in the culture pages of liberalism's newest literary beacon, provides a glimpse into the true future of the New Deal coalition: Dogtown and Z-Boys is a documentary by director and former skateboarding champion Stacy Peralta...
...May 6, 2002] THE GREAT BOOKS SERIES Strobe Talbott, 30 years of chummy friend-ship with his college roommate, Bill Clinton, and still completely in the dark about the man's ithyphallic zaniness: The meltdown of the Russian economy would have been bigger news that Monday if it didn't have to compete with a spectacular and sordid story breaking in Washington...
...Magistrate, thank you...
...And my number one goal was to make sure everybody loved me...
...President, if you were to survey this audience, I would suspect that you would find many perhaps most of us, who like to think of ourselves as policy wonks in one or another subject...
...Tony Kushner: I hope you are aflame with vision, ambition and hope...
...Or blame the Bush administration.That's what I do...
...June 17, 2002] THE NEW YORK TIMES In a lead editorial in the venerable Times, "human decency" once again is revealed as the menace to the Constitution that we all know it to be: By declaring yesterday that the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" bars the execution of mentally retarded people, the Supreme Court injected a limited but wholly welcome measure of human decency into the nation's use of the death penalty...
...Pete, I'm delighted to be here with you, because you're a better policy wonk than I am.You could not have given me an introduction that would have pleased me more...
...Thank you very much...
...June 2002] JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 81...
...Reagan not only lied publicly (and feloniously) about his erstwhile Communist front activities and, possibly, about his later ties to the John Birch Society...
...I just sort of shifted with the winds...
...Brock's experiences as a right-wing media hitman in the 1990s also didn't occur in a historical vacuum...
...A bummer but not a surprise...
...Thank you very much...
...from The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy, by Strobe Talbott, Random House, 478 pages, $29.95] COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS An encomiastic orgy as CFR magnifico Peter G. Peterson introduces ex-Boy President Bill Clinton to a CFR audience at thel'ale Club in NewYork City and Mr...
...Talbott] gave me a mercifully brief, but still almost unbearable summary...
...David Brock's tell-all Blinded by the Right parallels another account by a young man who came to Washington and found a home in Republican circles.That confessional book was Blind Ambition by Richard Nixon's White House counsel John Dean, who described how his drive to succeed led him to join the crimes ofWatergate...
...blame your parents, why not...
...May 13, 2002] THE NATION O happy day, commencement-wise, at lovely Vassar, from the Honorary Doctor ofJuris Doctors, Mr...
...COM On a fabulous pro-Clinton website, the cruelest cut against David Brock yet made: David as John Dean...
...hasn't this past year, your senior year, hasn't it been the worst year ever in the history of humankind...
...It is, not to put too fine a point on it, superb...
...But there is much more to Iceland than meets the eye...
...the other half (narrated by Sean Penn) carefully researches the birth of a phenomenon—skateboarding's roots in outlaw surfing and a gang of beach kids pulled together by a couple of surf Fagins (Jeff Ho and Skip Eng.-blom) to make the Zephyr team (the Z-Boys) and then the dominantly successful Dogtown one...
...Peralta's film—probably wisely—doesn't go there...
...His entire political career now stands exposed as largely manufactured and then tended to by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, at a time when the FBI was not so much the merely dysfunctional bureau it has become, as it was the nation's right-wing secret police...
...With this report in the Chronicle, every account of Reagan's life will now have to be rewritten...
...Did skateboarding invent punk rock, the fuck-you-ness and physicality of it...
...President, we are delighted to welcome you back and to hear your thoughts on globalization in the 21st century...
...I mean who could blame you, really...
...It's not a pretty sight...
...Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered...
...I couldn't watch...
...Thank you...
Vol. 35 • July 2002 • No. 4
