CURRENT WISDOM
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Washington Post From columnist Tom Shales, more evidence that our suave President's "Compassionate Conservative" catnip has failed: It wouldn't be unthinkable to call the Bush...
...She is well-scrubbed without being wholesome, with a defiantly naked face that challenges prevailing notions of gender and beauty...
...Her hair has the swingy movement of the freshly washed, but it is ripply, almost wild, neither straightened nor curled, devoid of what stylists refer to as "product...
...Not surprisingly, accounts of Washington doings are suffused with a sense of pointlessness...
...All eyes turned to him...
...Yet for more than 20 years, liberals have been on the defensive and conservatives ascendant...
...We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country...
...Mystified, but not surprised...
...It might seem odd that a savvy New Yorker like me is voting for a guy in a cowboy hat," he went on, as he recklessly doled out ice cream to a network anchor, "but what we want is stability...
...Corset ads from a hundred years ago also advertised their products with unseemly before and appealing after images—engravings, not photos, in that day...
...True, it's not everyday that you forgo a $3.6 million contract for joining the military...
...He really believed them: In Washington an age of moral and philosophical sterility is deeply entrenched, and as Elizabeth Drew's reporting in these pages attests, the result is not pretty...
...However, in my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, Tillman would have been called a "pendejo," an idiot...
...September 2003) In These Times At the concert hall with the suave Miss Jody Kolodzey, and remember to wear your raincoat: Against an entertainment industry that seems so wedded to the cosmetics industry that a woman's face is likely to be the only thing she doesn't bare, Patti Smith's appearance is a shocker...
...Since then government has seemed to be mostly about raising money to get elected, and then reelected repeatedly in order to service those who put up the money...
...How is anyone ever to learn the truth...
...They should call Pat Tillman's army life "Rambo 4: Rambo Attempts to Strike Back at His Former Rambo 3 Taliban Friends, and Gets Killed...
...April 28, 2004) Washington Post Miss Tina Brown, the distinguished urban anthropologist, reports on her latest expedition through deepest darkest Midtown Manhattan: There was a surreal moment at a serious Manhattan dinner party Tuesday night when 12 power players who had all been talking at once about the mess in Iraq suddenly fell silent to listen to the waiter...
...December 22, 2003) JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...
...Apparently "wardrobe malfunctions" are important enough to talk about for weeks, but no one wants to talk about what our President and his Administration are really up to...
...And, not just the regular army, but the elite Army Rangers...
...Well, he got his wish...
...You know he was a real Rambo, who wanted to be in the "real" thick of things...
...He dove in shortly after he had served the coconut cake with lemon dessert—perhaps to give moral support to the only Republican present, who was beginning to flag...
...These typically juxtapose the before and after pictures of, say, a head-to-toe shot of a woman whose belly is bulging over her bikini bottom and another shot of her new svelte and toned physique, promising you the same transformation if only you buy the cellulite cream or diet pills being hawked...
...Rene Gonzalez (U-Mass...
...Gonzalez entered a Manhattan Peep Show seeking companionship: I've been mystified at the absolute nonsense of being in "awe" of Tillman's "sacrifice" that has been the American response...
...The decline dates from the end of the cold war, which suddenly and shockingly left Washington without any purpose that could be called visionary or even faintly noble...
...She wears a single-breasted black suit jacket with a discreet peace button on the lapel and a small stain between the pocket and the hem on the left side...
...May 2004) New York Review of Books Two years after President George W Bush's West Point speech inaugurating his Doctrine of Preemption and with two wars behind us, former New York Times poet laureate Russell Baker reveals that even in retirement he is an idiot...
...Even Rambo got shot in the third movie, but in real life, you die as a result of being shot...
...Radcons are revolutionaries...
...And they are meeting with woefully little resistance...
...April 9, 2004) The Progressive Hurled heroically upon the howl page of the otherwise exemplary Progressive, the lament of an idealist betrayed: The one thing that has always appalled me about The Progressive is that it has never given any pro-Cuban or pro-Soviet Union voices a chance to state their position...
...Professor Reich served in the Clinton cabinet along with Mr...
...This Kerry guy—he's all over the place...
...Radical conservatives—"radcons," I call them—are 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 CURRENT WISDOM taking over the public agenda...
...graduate student and obvious moviegoer) upon learning of the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman, and just before Mr...
...Although it shines the expected shade of blackunder the fluorescent lighting of the Green Room, the stage lights lift it to a pale brown, streaked with grey and haloed in blood red...
...All those fatuous columns he penned for the Times were not pap for the credulous...
...This form of sales pitch isn't new...
...I could tell he was that type of macho guy, from his scowling, beefy face on the CNN pictures...
...May 13, 2004) Washington Monthly Miss Sarah Wildman, cerebrating on a public policy matter of consequence for progressives everywhere, displays a reassuring Sense of History: Flip through any consumer magazine today, and you'll find numerous "makeover" ads...
...For them, ends justify means...
...May 3, 2004) .-trospect Prof Robert B. Reich remonstrates against the mess we are in brief years after the Clinton Renaissance...
...I'm from the suburbs," he announced, "and I'm voting for Bush...
...They'll do whatever it takes to win...
...Larry Flynt and Miss Monica Lewinsky: In my view, being a liberal is something to be proud of...
...CURRENT WISDOM Washington Post From columnist Tom Shales, more evidence that our suave President's "Compassionate Conservative" catnip has failed: It wouldn't be unthinkable to call the Bush administration the most vindictive since that of Richard M. Nixon...
...April 29, 2004) Thu Despair from Carmen Paxton of Louisville, Kentucky, who apparently has been denied access to a television set: I'm sad and frustrated that important issues like the lying by our Administration about this war, the state of the economy, etc., are ignored by the mainstream media...
...April 2004) Daily Collegian (University of Massachusetts) The sincerely held sentiment of Mr...
...There is no moral urgency in it, no philosophical imperative at work...
...But, does that make him a hero...
...And she spits...
...Listen to Paul Weyrich, prominent radcon founder of The Heritage Foundation and coiner of the term "moral majority": "We are no longer workingto preserve the status quo...
...Or perhaps he just thought it might be helpful for the guests to hear from one of the OrdinaryAmericans whose unhappiness with the status quo they are in the habit of earnestly invoking...
Vol. 37 • June 2004 • No. 5
