Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
HARPER'S Victorian translation of the ruminations of Lewis H. Lapham, constipated editor of America's most tiresome catalogue of errors: Since the shock of September 11, 2001, the American public...
...So he broke for about five or six minutes for prayers and then resumed the interview...
...I shouldn't say that, but on behalf of the country, it would be better without Rush Limbaugh and his twenty-million listeners...
...Enron...
...They wanted to believe he wasn't just a harasser but a rapist...
...Under these circumstances, any other president would be in danger of losing his job...
...It's criminal...
...February 26, 2003] THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The amazing popularity of "two junior-grade Hitlers," as assessed by public relations expert Albert R. Hunt: On Sept...
...Rather noticed that the Iraqi leader was looking at his watch...
...March 2003] THE GREAT BOOKS SERIES Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton, D.D., eminent appraiser of arses, offers up his geopolitical appraisal of how the United Staffs of America ended the Cold War without nuclear holocaust or any further mayhem to Ms...
...March 2003] THE NEW YORK OBSERVER How the wily Saddam Hussein covered a politically incorrect cigarette break during his ordeal with the dour Dan Rather: After about an hour Mr...
...Rather said...
...from Al on America by Reverend Al Sharpton, Dafina Books, 282 pages, $27.00] Problems of a urological nature admitted to by Miss Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On [Not] Getting By in America, and other thrillers: Don't ask me about my New Year's resolutions for 2003...
...I think O'Reilly and Matthews are entertainers...
...February 2003] THE AMERICAN PROSPECT Another hallucinatory pronunciamento from Robert B. Reich, duly elected governor of Massachusetts and the tallest man ever to serve as secretary of labor: A midterm USA Today/CNN/ Gallup Poll had Bush's job approval rating falling to 58 percent, dropping below 60 percent for the first time since the September 11 attacks...
...Alterman: No question, it's Limbaugh...
...media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press...
...despite all this, the huddled, befuddled masses have been quiet as church mice...
...January 5, 2003] ESQUIRE In a historic interview with Esquire, "Magazine of the American Islamic Male," Ayatollah Eric Abdul Berserk Alterman, makes his plea for the execution of twenty million red-blooded Americans and the plugging of Rush Limbaugh's ears—all for a return to civility among The Believers: Q: As a liberal, who do you find more objectionable: Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, or Rush Limbaugh...
...March 6, 2003] VANITY FAIR The hysterical sentiments of every anti-Bush New York Times editorial published since the cad and his unscrupulous lawyers committed coup d'etat in the Sunshine State back in aught aught, as compressed into a single paragraph by James Wolcott, VF resident worrywart: Never before have so many put up with so much from so few...
...As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded...
...January 15, 2003] THE BOSTON GLOBE SUNDAY MAGAZINE Midst a 10,000-word profile on the most unfortunate automobile driver in the history of the United States Senate, writer Charles Pierce lapses into one of the weirdest examples ever of that sempiternally weird literary form, Kennedy Nostalgia: If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be sixty-two years old...
...Tawana Brawley, his most famous congregant: For decades America, under the guise of "keeping peace," has gone into other countries and destabilized governments for its own greed and quest for power...
...Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place...
...They wanted to believe he was somehow responsible for the murders of two kids at the Mena airstrip in Arkansas...
...I don't think anybody would follow the other two into fire, but Limbaugh is different...
...But after looking at his watch the third time, he had the translator say, 'It's time for the president to pray...
...Every other year I have resolved to be nicer, more sensitive and caring, fitter, more serene and evolved [sic...
...But this year I've decided to stay exactly the same and let everyone else do the resolving...
...its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology, and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties...
...It's unconscionable...
...Despite corporate robbery, a trampling of civil liberties that makes the Red Scare look like a dress rehearsal, a rapist urge to ram a paved road or oil pipeline through every nature preserve, a Tony Soprano foreign policy that fingers which dirt-bag country we're going to whack next, an unaccountable vice president who pops out of his ground hole only to raise money for the Republican Party or play bad cop on Meet the Press, and the corny spectacle of the president himself imploring us to visit a shut-in and say, "I love you" (and they accused Clinton of being empath in chief...
...He hopes you will understand he is going to take a break for his prayers...
...To begin with, the corporate inanities, like the current Whole Foods shopping bag that urges me to 'Share the Season.' Sure, I'll share the season...
...I said to myself, Th-oh, he is trying to wrap it up,'" Mr...
...I hate to say it, but I wish the guy would have gone deaf...
...Many Clinton-haters would believe anything, literally anything, about Bill Clinton...
...I know this political psychosis well, because I have seen it at work in conservative ideological quarters during the Clinton years...
...Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age...
...February 2003] NEW YORK POST Columnist John Podhoretz bids fare to become a David Brock for the twenty-first century: The word "psychosis" is defined as "any severe mental disorder in which contact with reality is lost or highly distorted...
...Send me your address and I'll Fed-Ex you a Ziploc baggy filled with doggy-poop-permeated local slush...
...February 2003] THE NEW YORK TIMES His soul full of junk food, columnist Bob Herbert is driven to grim dithyrambs of a highly judgmental nature: Education is the food that nourishes the nation's soul...
...HARPER'S Victorian translation of the ruminations of Lewis H. Lapham, constipated editor of America's most tiresome catalogue of errors: Since the shock of September 11, 2001, the American public has quickened the pace of its retreat into the shelters of harmless speech and heavy law enforcement...
...The lack of civility he demonstrates toward liberal politicians is really dangerous to our political public...
...11, 2001, America was hit by a horrific terrorist attack, drawing support and empathy around the globe...
...He has an army...
...When public officials refuse to provide adequate school resources for the young, it's the same as parents refusing to feed their children...
...They wanted to believe it...
...It's an insane society that can contemplate devastating and then rebuilding Iraq, but can't bring itself to provide schooling for all of its young people here at home...
...Maybe I've hit the curmudgeon point of the life cycle, but there are just too many things pissing me off...
...The wonderful little magazine that gave me my start as a young writer, The American Spectator, was ruined and finally shattered by its psychotic obsession with Clinton's evil ways...
...The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams...
...This political psychosis destroyed careers and entire institutions...
...We have made unholy alliances that are now biting us in the behind...
...February 27, 2003] THE TIMES (LONDON) The Alas and Goddamn school of historiography, as practiced by author John le Carre: America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs, and in the long term THE PROGRESSIVE potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War...
...The combination of compliant U.S...
...I didn't make any...
...its shameless favoring of the already too-rich...
...If I were to measure the general level of submissiveness by my own encounters with the habit of self-censorship and the general concern with social hygiene—acquaintances reluctant to remark on the brutality of the Israeli army for fear of being thought anti-Semitic, public scolds who damn me as a terrorist for smoking a cigarette in Central Park, college students so worried about the grooming of their resumes that they avoid rock concerts on the off-chance that their face might show up on a police department videotape—I might be tempted to argue that America's winning of the Cold War resulted in the loss of its soul...
...We have taken on two junior-grade Hitlers, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and less than a year and a half later are losing in the court of world opinion...
...The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2
