CURRENT WISDOM

...This reminds me of the song we sang as children: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me...

...Cheney, Ms...

...And because, in the absence of a competent or brave Congress, of a mobilized citizenry, that level of power lies in your hands, it is you who have misused it to become our country’s and our constitution’s most devastating enemy...

...Kids, that’s C-L-E-V-E-L-A-N-D...

...It scares Korb, too...

...He is one of the persons most responsible for allowing the plague of AIDS to grow from 41 cases in 1981 to over 70 million today...

...March 15, 2007) Brought to AmSpec’s attention by John T. Zubal, Cleveland, Ohio...

...From What A Party...

...Albright, who was part of Carter’s national security team in the 1970s, long before she was the U.S...

...He refused to even say the word out loud for the first seven years of his presidency...

...That was how they cooked up the nonsense they put out against Clinton, alleging that he’d ordered the murder of political opponents and been involved with drug running, which they would then have Rush Limbaugh and other radio hosts talk up until they were ready to pass out...

...Once conservatives gained power, they held on to it tenaciously… (March 15, 2007) Associated Press Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, apparently drunk in public: “I think that Iraq is going to go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy,” Albright said Thursday, with former President Jimmy Carter at her side in one of a series of “Conversations at the Carter Center...

...When will our liberal friends reconcile themselves to a twoparty system of government...

...CURRENT WISDOM Concord Monitor On the howl page of a great liberal gazette Miss Rosemary Mellon, the Katie Couric of greater metropolitan Franklin, New Hampshire, makes a Herculean effort at ratiocination: The Jewish lobby’s hold on this country and Bush’s wearing his religion on his sleeve lead me to believe there is no real desire to be involved...

...It makes Korb want to cry...

...Is that cricket...

...Reagan’s administration, like Mr...

...You have broken our country and our hearts...

...Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives— people who built their careers by serv 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 CURRENT WISDOM ing the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s...

...Rice et al.: Indeed America has a rich history of greatness— indeed, America is still today a devastating military superpower...

...Larry Kramer, the Griper: Ronald Reagan may have done laudable things but he was also a monster and, in my estimation, responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler...

...March 19, 2007) Huffington Post Another solemn address from the anurous Hollywoodian Mr...

...We may not recognize that Al Gore has become a statesman...

...She has always had test anxiety herself, right up through earning her master’s degree in education at Ursuline College last year...

...The test really scares them...

...If not, so what...

...Every democratic state knows that Israel has a right to exist...

...He can talk to Republicans, at least of the non-flat-earth variety...

...The United States cuts off all ties with Hamas because Hamas says the “Jews do not have a right to exist...

...ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of state under former President Bill Clinton, said many Americans believe that they should be loved around the world...

...Sean Penn in splendid vibrato on the website of morons: Four and a half years ago, I addressed the issue of war in an open letter to our President...

...Today, they take the science portion...

...Well, you and the smarmy pundits in your pocket, those who bathe in the moisture of your soiled and bloodstained underwear, can take that noise and shove it...

...The job of the next president will be to restore the goodness of American power...

...Today I would like to again speak to him and his, directly...

...At the same time you would be hard-pressed to find another major public figure so conversant with such a wide span of technology and with the earth, air, fire and water problems which are reaching crisis proportions in our century...

...We cower as you point fingers telling us to “support our troops...

...The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law...

...April 12, 2007) The Nation.com Nicholas Von Hoffman, relegated to website drudge work but freshly sober, can now retire a happy man: Gore has something of the 19th century about him...

...Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, the Hon...

...But now, we are encouraged to self-censor any words that might be perceived as inflammatory—if our belief is that this war should stop today...

...We have lost the element of goodness in American power, and we have lost our moral authority,” she said...

...Geraldine Ferraro swaggers: “The only thing that can stop Hillary becoming the next president would be smears and dirty tricks,’’ said Geraldine Ferraro, the Democrats’ losing 1984 vice-presidential candidate...

...ROSEMARY MELLON Franklin (March 30, 2007) Boston Globe The topic of her column is global warming and Ellen Goodman has to go and drag in Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pronounced ahma late’ fur dinner dad...

...That was when the different strands really came together—the founding of National Review magazine eventually led to a whole network of conservative publications, from the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review to something called The American Spectator, which took under-the-table money from an ultraconservative named Richard Mellon Scaife and used it to send reporters out to do just enough digging to give the veneer of truth to wild, unfounded charges...

...I’ve told her I’ll go anywhere and speak any time to make sure that doesn’t happen.’’ (April 1, 2007) New York Review of Books And just when the Gipper’s esteem is spreading, along comes Mr...

...March 24, 2007) Sunday Telegraph Just days after a Harris Poll reports that 50 percent of the electorate would under no circumstances vote for Sen...

...She has felt sick all week, watching her students—her babies, the children whose lives she hoped to shape—take the Ohio Graduation Test...

...He has a deep voice and sometimes he thunders as few modern politicians can...

...February 9, 2007) New York Review of Books A brief history of Bill Clinton’s 1990s, from Michael Tomasky, who apparently served as one of the Boy President’s willing interns in the lingerie section of the White House: We entered our current era of polarization in 1992, when a well-funded conservative echo machine worked to destroy Clinton, a project that never let up until the day he left office (the Marc Rich pardon, the White House furniture “scandal...

...It has been so long since we have seen one that we may not remember what one looks like...

...Thomas Dunne Books, 406 pages, $24.95] MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...

...by Terry McAuliffe...

...He is almost courtly in his manners...

...President, Mr...

...February 23, 2007) The Plain Dealer The heartbreak of high school education as experienced by first-year teacher Miss Janett Korb and her young dunces, as reported by a sympathetic Plain Dealer reporter, hanky in hand: Today, without a doubt, Janett Korb will feel sick...

...But that was nothing like the anxiety she feels for her students, who have been sitting in silent classrooms for 2/12 hours every day this week, taking a five-part test that they must pass to graduate...

...Perhaps through diplomacy, engagement, and aid, this can be erased from the lips of Hamas...

...Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events...

...The needless blood on your hands, and therefore, on our own, is drowning the freedom, the security, and the dream that America might have been, once healed of and awakened by, the tragedy of September 11, 2001...

...March 23, 2007) The Great Books Series Professor Terry McAuliffe, the Boy President’s golfing companion, continues his intellectual history of the United States, delving this time into AmSpec articles that have yet to be written and our tyrannical control of El Rushbo: Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, capping the Watergate scandal, pushed the Republicans to a whole new level of desperation...

...Everyone knows differently...

...New York Times The “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” rendered by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman in his trademark prosaic style...

...On the day that the latest report on global warming was released, I went out and bought a light bulb...

...And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package...

...Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future...

...I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny...