CURRENT WISDOM
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Kingston Whig and Standard The day-to-day concerns of an enlightened father in Stella, Canada, "Gay Capital of North America": My daughter is 26. My greatest fear is that a...
...Avenue, Washington, D.C.: Since team Bush came to power, those of us lucky enough to have the time and money to go on vacation have tried to escape from, or forget, however briefly, the totalitarian and imperialistic schemes of our in-house American Taliban...
...They were determined to do something about it...
...Hugh Jenney, Stella (August 13, 2003) New York Times Miss Maureen Dowd speaks to her therapist through the medium of her nationally-syndicated column written somewhere in the Fourth World: Don't get me started on the Blaster virus sabotaging Microsoft systems, or the cram of spam reminding us that the average American is an impotent, insecure, overweight, tired, depressed loser desperately seeking to refinance...
...Otherwise known as "Fab 5," they barrel into a different straight guy's home each week to perform a brilliant, bitchily witty exorcism of their victim's pleated pants, prune butter, nose hair and nasty underpants . . . ." (August 4, 2003) 111In closing her review of a book on the "McCarthy Era," Miss Carolyn See renders a précis of the late Cold War, as recollected through the bird-brained mind of a Cosmopolitan girl: Now it's over...
...August 13, 2003) The New Yorker Signs of a religious revival in the otherwise profane commentary of Hendrik Hertzberg, reformed Jimmy Carter speechwriter: Remember the old joke about politics being show business for ugly people...
...September 3, 2003) The Progressive Miss Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, lets slip the exotic destinations covered on the book tour of typical liberal goody-goody: When I was in Scandinavia last spring promoting Nickel and Dimed, interviewers kept asking me to tell them about the "debate" my book had provoked in the United States...
...It went away...
...Get out the costumes...
...It is so over...
...Or the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia...
...August 10, 2003) In These Times ITT columnist Susan Douglas's last, desperate communiqué before being personally transported by Attorney General John Ashcroft to St...
...August 11, 2003) 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 Salt Lake Tribune Stupendous vibrations from the addlepated Walter Cronkite, in the first installment of a nationally syndicated column that is sure to be a staple of this publicly-spirited department: We [journalists] reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all...
...Elizabeth's Hospital, 2700 Martin Luther King Jr...
...Grooming guru Kyan Douglas, fashion maven Carson Kressley, food expert Ted Allen, interior designer Thom Filicia and "culture vulture" Jai Rodriguez are the gay miracle workers on Bravo TV's new series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy...
...Think Nixon...
...I wish the theologians who have missed God's message would sin no more...
...If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as . . . we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism...
...September 2003) Washington Post Book World The infelicitously named Jackson Lears reviews Professor Wolfgang Schivelbusch's gibbering little opuscule, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, and succumbs to the third-rate mind's unscotchable impulse to psychoanalyze: Of course, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon created a separate rationale for revenge, among the populace as well as policymakers...
...This is our misfortune, and we will be living with it for a long time to come...
...Write the libretto...
...Well, right-wing radio is niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...
...So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful...
...Bush's advisers came of age in the shadow of defeat, fearing that the United States might become a "pitiful, helpless giant" (in Richard Nixon's memorable phrase...
...July 13, 2003) American Prospect Cheeky reflections of another Lingerie Liberal: They're our latest superheroes, expertly coiffed and outfitted, ready to blaze a path of good hygiene and high fashion through the Animal Houses of America...
...Either way truths will be revealed...
...As so often happens in our society today, he will, when in his forties, run off with a man, leaving my daughter with two children...
...The blame for these oft-recurring tragedies can be laid on the front steps of those theologians who miss God's message of love to all His people...
...Send in the clowns...
...But think of the losers in both countries downwind from the atomic tests...
...Still, Schivelbusch is on to something...
...My greatest fear is that a charming, talented and handsome homosexual will be forced by our homophobic society to marry her to prove he is "straight...
...Like German nationalists after World War I, they wanted to reassert imperial power on a grand scale, and circumstances presented them with an extraordinary chance to do so...
...July 21, 2003) Washington Post Another candid moment with Senator Tom Daschle, Lion of the Senate, during a long automobile trip with a worshipful Post reporter: You learn a great deal about someone on a road trip...
...Maybe then my daughter will not have to suffer the shock, humiliation and loss caused by homophobic theologians...
...Nonetheless, it was difficult to shake the sense of doom unleashed by the forces of darkness, and some of us spent previous vacations looking longingly at maps of Canada, fantasizing about where to move...
...Nor would you learn that the Senate's leading Democrat needs frequent bathroom breaks...
...Think of the black list...
...August 8, 2003) OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61...
...Shared encapsulation fosters bonds or agitation, or CURRENT WISDOM both...
...If you were doing this interview in an office, you wouldn't get the same dimension of assessment than if you're stuck with me for eight or 10 hours," Daschle says...
...I come from a family with small bladders...
...A supine media reinforced our sense that we were exiles in our own land...
Vol. 36 • October 2003 • No. 5
