Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT THE GREAT BOOKS SERIES Sid Vicious, on what he learned from a Peter Jennings operative: If [Chris] Viasto was an apolitical scandalmonger at ABC News, Dorrance Smith, producer of This...
...Santorum...
...He does not help our cause and detracts from the meaningful dialogue we need to further our substantive goals...
...Troops require water, and tanks require gasoline...
...For this reason, the project of reconstruction is impossible...
...There's reason to suspect that the resolution approving war against Iraq was deliberately timed by Rove and Bush to occur just before the 2002 midterm election...
...As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, and children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue...
...but come on Michael, your only sin displayed before the public is envy—you playboy you: Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number...
...One of its founders has compiled a recommended reading list for the faithful...
...Its adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy, and experimental art...
...The group has been known to treat nitrous oxide as a sacrament and to throw Jacuzzi parties...
...Oversized and overweight, the SUV disdains negotiated agreements to restrict atmospheric pollution...
...The Washington bureau was like an outpost of the American Spectator," an ABC News correspondent told me...
...Without these, no force 250 miles from base will be useful for long...
...May 5, 2003] THE DAILY TELEGRAPH Feline vituperations from famed British hypochondriac Margaret Drabble, who knows not Tums for the tummy and has that fashionable sickness of the leftist British intelligentsia, halitosis: My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable...
...Like U.S...
...Smith had been President Bush's communications director, and his secretary in the White House had been Linda Tripp...
...It's been back and forth...
...May 15, 2003] REASON The all-around regular guy of the twenty-first century as apprehended and appraised by one Jesse Walker, zoologist There is a group in the Dallas area called the Hot Tub Mystery Religion...
...Being blonde is a massive cultural responsibility, and every time I've tried to do another color, I can't—I freak out...
...Still, I think...
...May 8, 2003] ROLLING STONE Yeasty observations of an ontological nature from Miss Courtney Love, suggesting that every generation has its own Miss Susan Sontag: Hugh Hefner would like you to think the whole blonde-bombshell thing began with the first Playboy with Marilyn Monroe, but you have to really look into that...
...Why, given the numerous reports documenting the inherent dangers of SUVs, would Dodge use this metaphor...
...foreign policy, the sport-utility vehicle comes packaged in sonorous mission statements...
...No one should imagine that the civilians sent in to do this work can be made secure...
...That is what victory means...
...And so the political battle—the battle for hearts and minds—will be lost...
...Second, Iraqi soldiers embedded in civilian populations—both those along supply lines and in Baghdad—can only be destroyed alongside those populations...
...Moral Tails Virtue for Dog% etc.And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment, maybe there is a God after all...
...The answer is simple...
...May 1, 2003] THE AMERICAN PROSPECT In the innovative pages of AmPros, Professor James Galbraith experiments with precisely how many fallacious asseverations can be laid down in 324 words of pompous prose: The main flaws are now plain...
...He was calling the shots...
...Of course it was outrageous to brand Cleland "unpatriotic;' but Bush and Rove are not easily embarrassed...
...You can watch the beginnings (if you have satellite television) even now as injured children fill up the hospitals of Baghdad...
...To support "the groundwork" for this effort is to support a holocaust, quite soon, against Iraqi civilians and also against the troops on both sides...
...In our culture, death sells...
...The moral strategy would be to avoid the holocaust...
...First, the strategy left very long supply lines exposed and vulnerable...
...To achieve that from the present disastrous position, the United States would have to accept a ceasefire, which would lead to the withdrawal of coalition forces under safe conduct...
...I've made millions off people loving me, hating me, hating to love me, and loving to hate me...
...Even if those are his beliefs and even if they're shared by the Catholic Church, as you point out . . . he should shut his trap and keep them to himself...
...In a crowded world, the SUV appears as a dangerous anachronism...
...Republicans are already seen in an unfavorable light, as uncaring and intolerant, an image we must all work to change...
...Meanwhile, the prime stocks of precision munitions have been drawn down, and speculation about the future use of cluster bombs and napalm and other vile weapons is being heard...
...The charge of a lack of patriotism helped to defeat Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, who had lost two legs and an arm in the Vietnam War...
...It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness...
...Retreat is unthinkable...
...Thus the Iraqis could force the transformation of the second strategy into the first...
...It exposes outsiders to deadly risk in order to provide for the illusory security of its occupants...
...It's a Young Miss Question, but look who you're listening to...
...it includes a collection of Tantric exercises, a text on Sufism, one of Philip K. Dick's gnostic science fiction stories, and a novel by the Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton...
...George W. Bush's neoconservatives (standing safely in the back) will figuratively execute any who quail...
...800,000,000 pages...
...May 1, 2003] THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Miss Elizabeth Drew elucidates how Senator Max Cleland, triple-amputee Vietnam veteran, was transformed into the liberals' Alger Hiss of 2002 by Mr...
...He kept opposing views off the air and put views supportive of Starr on the air:' [from The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal...
...The obsession with blonde bombshells goes back even farther than Marilyn...
...May 2003] THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Paul from San Francisco remonstrates with WSJ editors over how to maintain "the meaningful dialogue we need": I'm from San Francisco, white, straight, and a passionate Republican, and I can find no defense for bigoted 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 WISDOM views like those of Sen...
...And, being military realists, they have done so...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Dorrance was in constant touch with Tripp...
...Maybe he recklessly neglects to brush after every meal, to buckle up as he drives his Volvo to Gomorrah to watch the naked women...
...CURRENT THE GREAT BOOKS SERIES Sid Vicious, on what he learned from a Peter Jennings operative: If [Chris] Viasto was an apolitical scandalmonger at ABC News, Dorrance Smith, producer of This Week, was ultimately political...
...If history is a guide, you cannot subdue a large and hostile city, except by destroying it completely...
...It would, however, entail the humiliation of the entire Bush administration, indeed its well-deserved political collapse...
...Short of massacre, we will not inherit a pacified Iraq...
...Paul Bressie, San Francisco, California [May 2, 2003] NEW RENAISSANCE Still more distressing ant-SUVism, this time from the pen of Arnie Cooper, writing in an impressively hopeful publication possibly funded by one of the political action committees allied to Hillary: A recent printed ad for the Dodge Ram shows the truck's imposing grille covered with dead bugs and huge letters with a warning: "Some Bugs Die More Noble Deaths Than Others...
...It has possessed me, like a disease...
...People were streaking and dying their hair in the Roman Empire...
...but underneath it is just an oversized pickup truck with too much power...
...The level of violence will therefore be raised...
...The dilemma is now acute...
...30.00] THE ONION In its satirical horoscope the satirical Onion joshes the editors of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR for their long-standing commitment to the Paraguayan Youth Movement of exiled General Alfredo Stroessner: Cancer: (June 22-July 22) You will be hailed as a hero by the American Spectator when you shoot three suspicious-looking Hispanic kids in the back while guarding the West Park Mall...
...Karl Rove in just one speech to the Republican National Committee: In a speech by Rove to the Republican National Committee in January 2002, he urged Republicans to take political advantage of Bush's war on terrorism, arguing that the public has more confidence in Republicans on national defense...
...Blondeness has always stood for virtue—and for [prostitution], too, before red hair did...
...There would be no military dishonor in such a step...
...Volume 11, Number 4] THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS In a leading intellectual review, blatant anti-SUVism, that foul contemporary bigotry increasingly recognized by human rights advocates as"the anti-Semitism of the back-seat driver": If you want to understand how America appears to the world today, consider the sport-utility vehicle...
...May 7, 2003] THE WASHINGTON POST Boastful sinner Michael Kinsley lords his lubricious life over the fallen William Bennett, and what do you suppose his proud sin might be...
...It consumes inordinate quantities of scarce resources to furnish its privileged inhabitants with supererogatory services...
...Have you seen him in his volupt flesh...
...The news over the weekend that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and bestselling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion-dollar gambling habit—has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts...
...The not so hidden message: if you're gonna get killed by a vehicle, it might as well be a Ram...
...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 81...
...So do we love blondes or hate blondes—or both...
...I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
