Current Wisdom

...In Texas, it's OK to be a little bit surly...

...It is redolent of Attic sunshine, the sweet smells of the Aegean, Grecian meadows...

...Through a personal connection, I forwarded the materials to Talbott...

...He had written a penetrating analysis of how free-market policies would destroy the industrial structure of the old Soviet Union, and with it the livelihoods of many millions living there...

...At heart, this is a mission to restore male power—and it's a link between homocons and the rest of the right...

...August 4, 2002] THE NATION Easy reading for the tattooed readers of The Nation, penned by Richard Gold-stein, author of The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right and a likely candidate for The Presidential Medal of Freedom if the criminal acts of Election 2000 are overturned and al-Gore assumes his rightful place at the head of this Nation: And it's not enough to butch up or femme down...

...And Bush, who is proudly unassimilated, does not just talk Texan—dropping his g's and quoting old wanted posters...

...That distinction remains as strong as ever today...

...What explains their rage and, while I am asking questions, could you think of another commentator—especially one on the left—who could have written what Coulter did about Muslims and go on to bestsellerdom...

...August 26, 2002] CROSSFIRE Live, on TV, the Jonathan Swift of punk liberalism: PAUL BEGALA, CO-HOST: Good evening and welcome to Crossfire...

...It is an eroticism from an ancient time when lines between homosexuality and heterosexuality were blurred, before distinctions were made and fear and prohibitions came into place...

...CURRENT THE NEW YORK TIMES Book reviewer Dinitia Smith longs for the good old days, centuries before sex education, safe sex and colonic irrigation: Sappho's poetry is filled with a golden eroticism...

...Was it a reflexive lunge at his permanent pinata, Bill Clinton, who used to vacation at Martha's Vineyard—and forever sullied it for Bush...

...I must be missing something here...

...The gay right is ready to lead a charge on behalf of what it calls "gender patriotism...

...The most powerful way for Christians and other concerned people to voice this message of compassion is to go vegetarian...

...It didn't seem a major offense, but Bush, for some reason, thought that he was being challenged and that Gregory was showing off, which he finds unforgivable when it invites comparison to him...

...Who could forget his flare-up at David Gregory, an NBC reporter who asked a question of the French president, in perfect French, which he had learned as a child in France...

...What was that all about...

...I ask this because such anger, such intolerance, such rage, such a compulsion to denigrate and to distort is hardly based on any reality...

...Masculinism is the tie that binds fundamentalists, free-market libertarianism and even Camille Paglia...

...The president told Associated Press reporter Scott Lindlaw, who was permitted to follow him on his 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 ranch rounds, that he knew not everybody appreciated the local charm but that more did than you might think—"Most Americans don't sit in Martha's Vineyard, swilling white wine...

...July 10, 2002] THE WASHINGTON POST Proof that George W Bush really knows how to hurt East Coast bon vivant Mary McCrory, as displayed by the outraged gal in her therapy column: And his anti-Eastern, anti-Atlantic Coast bias breaks out, as in that strange outburst the other day about people who unaccountably prefer sea breezes to the dead heat of central Texas...

...It is said that Sappho died for love of a younger man, Phaon, a ferry boat captain, that she threw herself off a cliff because of him...

...When Bush was a candidate, Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams took memorable note of his "curious air of resentment, the more puzzling for its place in a life so touched by advantage...

...If Democrats who'd made for-tunes from Bushlike patterns of crony capitalism were in the White House during a crisis of corporate integrity, does anyone doubt that Richard Scaife would have scram-bled the jets months ago and bankrolled mountains of American Spectator exposes...

...it adds to the aura of a citizen WISDOM of a large, assertive state that doesn't think much of the rest of the country...

...Or was it just his free-floating resentment of the East Coast and his conviction that it is inhabited by whining winos, decadent, supercilious, unpatriotic elitist liberals, who are now, to their surprise, quoting Dick Armey, the House Republican leader from Texas, who doesn't want to go to war...

...She may be a lesbian and a registered Democrat, but she swears an oath to macho...

...Has George W. forgiven his parents for his being born in Connecticut...

...But islandwide excessive drinking has not been an issue, and so far, at least, Clinton has not been charged with wine-swilling even by Bob Barr...

...Leijonhufvud was then an adviser to the new country of Kazakhstan...

...August 25, 2002] THE NEW REPUBLIC On the clamorous correspondence page of the venerable New Republic is uttered yet another revolutionary exhortation, perhaps best sloganized as "Christians, To The Salad Bar...

...August 4, 2002] THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER For distinguished columnist Matt Miller the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy continues to haunt the hallways of American history, arm in arm with McCarthyism: When the Texas Rangers were sold in 1998, while Bush was governor, his partners, Conason reports, "fattened his payout six times over by awarding him additional shares in the team at the time of the sale that brought his 1.8 percent share up to 12 percent...

...Branch Davidians...

...Being conservative is like being criminally insane: You can't be held accountable...

...And I told the president on the way there—it was nice being back in Air Force One talking to the president about the soldiers that I'm proud to represent—and I said that some of them had been injured in Operation Anaconda and I had heard that they had been (evacuated) out of Afghanistan to Europe and then to Walter Reed, so I went out to see them late one night after the Senate was done and went room to room talking to them and asking them how they were...

...He throws out his knees and holds his arms bent and away from his body in the classic pose of the cowboy or sheriff who may have to reach for his pistol at any moment...

...July 1, 2002] SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 81...

...He tries in every way he can to live down his long exposure to the East, Andover, Yale, Harvard...

...August 15, 2002] THE SYRACUSE POST-STANDARD Hillary Clinton turns into a nocturnal Florence Nightingale to trouble the sleep of American heroes: In her speech Monday to the Democratic Leadership Council in New York City, Senator Clinton spoke of accompanying President Bush on his July 19 trip to Fort Drum...

...This boosted Bush's return on a borrowed $600,000 investment from about $2.5 million to $15 million...

...Such harrumphing says some-thing not only about Coulter but about her audience...

...If, as Coulter says, liberals control the media and much of the animal and plant kingdoms, then how is it that the president du jour and others of recent times—Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush the Elder—happen to be conservatives...

...Daniel Elstein Brooklyn, New York [August 5 & 12, 2002)] THE AMERICAN PROSPECT The hapless James K Galbraith, on the yeasty pages of a great progressive organ, advancing a point on which all sensible readers can agree: In the late days of 1992, economist Axel Leijonhufvud of UCLA got in touch with me...

...Anyone think it's time to better understand what that was all about...

...No, the Bush economic summit...

...August 26, 2002] THE NEW YORK TIMES Al-Gore expatiating on himself and others of his high station on the op-ed page of the people's press: There has always been a debate over the destiny of this nation between those who believed they were entitled to govern because of their station in life, and those who believed that the people were sovereign...

...Tonight, a group of self-delusional right-wingers in a heavily armed compound in Waco, Texas, surrounded by federal agents...

...One does not need to be an animal-rights activist to realize how deplorable our treatment of animals is and to speak out against it...

...The anecdote is trivial...

...He walks Texan too...

...But that is probably a lie...

...August 13, 2002] THE WASHINGTON POST Richard Cohen, drunk and disorderly, on the op-ed page of the renowned Post of Washington: Is it time for an intervention...

...Leijonhufvud asked that I find a way to convey his papers to Strobe Talbott, who had just assumed a position as President Clinton's special adviser on Russian matters...

...Who are the people who read such tripe, who listen to talk radio and its chorus of conservatives (nary a liberal on the air) and who buy books such as the one under examination today...

...The petulance surfaced in Paris last spring...