CURRENT WISDOM
Jackasses, Assorted
The Great Books Series Part-time anthropologist Bill Clinton records a typical African greeting prefatory to the customary outbreak of small arms fire: In Africa, where the first...
...into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourageourenemies.Wearedeeply dividedanddivisionisweakness...
...Think how much better the world would be if we actually saw each other...
...Barack Obama, Newsweek journalist Richard Wolffe puff, puff, puffs into the Kultursmog: He's basically a centrist politician...
...August 9, 2007)Bill Moyers Journal (PBS) ThesempiternalsoundofpiousBill Moyerspattinghimselfontheback: ...those of us in public television have an obligation to make sure viewers like you stay in the loop...
...July 13, 2007) Countdown With Keith Olbermann (PMSNBC) More gastrointestinal wordplay from the noisome Mr...
...Iraq has fractured the U.S...
...You probably ought to be reading The National Enquirer as well, becausethatwillgiveyouevenmoreopportunitytoindulge yourfascination in other people's sex lives...
...Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages, $24.95] Philadelphia Daily News Attention-getting thoughts of a leadingPhiladelphiascribe,StuBykofsky, writingfromhistreehousehighabove Philly'sRittenhouseSquare: OnemonthfromTheAnniversary,I'm thinking another 9/11 would help America...
...It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children...
...The "gut feeling" has been described as breaking news...
...It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O'Reilly or Giuliani or Barack...
...So when I was growing up, I never really learned how to do those things...
...From Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, by Bill Clinton...
...Much to my ignorance, bleaching one's anus (I guess to bring it back to its bud-like 7 2 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 C U R R E N TW I S D O M puckish pink) has become an obsession far beyond the young jet set and the detail-oriented gay community...
...When we broadcast teach-ins on the Vietnam War, and the Watergate hearings during the trial of Richard Nixon, it was a real public service--the reason PBS was created...
...Actually, "gut feeling" would be closer to breaking wind...
...July 31, 2007) Washington Post On the occasion of the Wall Street Journal's purchase by one of the most successful and conservativemedia tycoons of recent memory, Rupert Murdoch, David Ignatius, a former WSJ reporter, sees only defeat and ignominy--all because the Journal's "right-wing" editorialists frightened away those longtime liberal heroes, the advertisers of corporate America...
...PresidentBushjoinedtheclubthisweekby citing the U.S...
...Run that throughagain: The Journal's editorial page increasinglydiditsownreporting,withequal portions of journalistic hustle andideological spin, and it often overshadowed the news side...
...A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically--thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq--that we have forgotten who the enemy is...
...BARNEY FRANK (July 22, 1987...
...It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky graspofhistory,spotlightedonceagain hisowndecisiontositouttheVietnam conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments againsthimandtheRepublicanParty...
...Chertoffsaidthissothattheleadstory on the newscast on ABC would not be Iraq or Alberto Gonzales or that USA Today poll, but that it would be this, you know, "gut feeling" of his, plus a vague sky-is-falling story about an al Qaeda cell...
...What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing...
...How could the Bush team Swiftboat John Kerry and Max Cleland-authenticVietnamwarheroes,whom the White House turned into surrendering pacifists in the war on terror-but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American ``resistance.'' (August 26, 2007) Morning Joe (MSNBC) Explicating the essentials of Sen...
...The Great Books Series Part-time anthropologist Bill Clinton records a typical African greeting prefatory to the customary outbreak of small arms fire: In Africa, where the first humans stood up on the savannah 150,000 years ago, some tribes have a remarkable way of greeting each other...
...But the sad part of this story is that "the empire," as we reporters once likedtocallit,wasalreadydying--and that so many of its wounds were selfinflicted...
...Olbermann, vulgarian: HomelandSecuritySecretary Chertoff reveals this "gut feeling" about an increased risk of terrorist activity here this summer...
...When one person says hello, the response is "I see you...
...Barney Frank The American Spectator's recent scholarly observations about his reckless ballyhooing of a private preference and our subscriber receives this unedifying semblance of jocularity on official stationery--we only tried to be helpful, Congressman Frank: Dear [Name Withheld]: I appreciate your sending me that note from The American Spectator, whichIhadn'tpreviouslyseen.Itiscomfortingtogetthisfurtherevidence of the maturity level of the people most opposed to me...
...And now, there are things I have to teach myself to do...
...It's months until September...
...July 19, 2007)Washington Post Jim Hoagland, the esteemed Post's increasingly desperate columnist, resorts to desperate rhetoric and descends into inscrutability nuanced by typical mainstream journalistic fussbudgetery: Desperate presidents resort to desperaterhetoric--whichthencallsnew attention to their desperation...
...How about my gut feeling that Mr...
...The war is killing us now, body and soul...
...He's annoyed the teachers union...
...Advertisers, in the end, perhaps weren't enthralled with a newspaper distinguished by vitriolic right-wing attack editorials...
...June 1987) Congress of the United States A concerned subscriber to this journal sends the Hon...
...He went to Detroit and annoyed the car industry.Butthewargiveshimalotof cover to take very centrist positions...
...September 2007) New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman laments that even the Republican attack team has its limits: One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team's war effort in IraqandagainstAlQaedaisthis:How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad...
...August 24, 2007) Marie Claire Fashion from the bottom up as reported in a leading ladies' monthly: Apparently, plenty of women want to go past the now-ordinary breast enhancementandpubicelectrolysisto aplacefewhaveheretoforedaredtogo in the name of beauty...
...His "gut feeling...
...These days, anal-bleaching creams can be purchased as easily as cough drops...
...Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate andBillClinton's"Ididnothavesexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president...
...failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq...
...August 2, 2007)C U R R E N TW I S D O M O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 7 3 From the Archives Timeless Tosh From Current Wisdoms Past (October 1987): Vegetarian Times Lungs filling with the fresh air of an America now liberated by the forces of Reaganism, actress Ally Sheedy recollects the oppressive conditions in feminism's Brave New World of the 1970s: My mother (Manhattan literary agent Charlotte Sheedy) was such a strongadherentofthewomen'sliberationmovement.Whatsheabsolutely did not want me to do was to wear make-up, wear a bra, wear anything that looked feminine, or anything that might be considered sexy...
...I suspect that helped undermine the franchise...
...We should keep Iraq in primetime every week--the fighting and dying, the suffering, the debate, the politics, the extraordinary costs...
...I really don't knowhowtocook--atall.AndIgrewupinthatgenerationofwomenwho never learned to put on make-up...
Vol. 40 • October 2007 • No. 8
