Happy Returns
Clinton, Kate
Unplugged Kate Clinton Happy Returns The night before the midterm elections, I left the U.S. with my galpal on a business trip to Kenya. Hers, not mine. I wasn't sad to leave. Despite the late...
...Abramoff was sent upriver...
...We finally landed twenty-four hours later in Nairobi-have I told you how much I love Ambien?-and got news that the Dems had taken the House...
...I won't be drinking a Woolite-tini...
...Whenwelanded, everyone wasaweek aheadintheir gloating, butIassure you, I have caught up.Ihad shows immediately, and selfishly worried that the electoral change would be a hard adjustment...
...We laid over in London, where the papers were speculating that Bush was on the sauce again...
...The long-range effects of their colonizing- genocide, civil war, illiteracy, poverty, environmental havoc-foretell the dire, long-range consequences of Boy George's colonizing binge in Iraq...
...And I will watch, finally with some satisfaction, when Nancy Pelosi sits upright in her double knits, next to Dick "Waterboard" Cheney slumped and grumpy behind George as he labors through his "If I Did It" State of the Union address...
...What's been bad for us has been good for me...
...This time was different...
...Clinton is a humorist...
...Kate "I heart Arizona...
...I worried that when I returned to the United States, everyone would be sipping Woolite Cosmos...
...The Kenyans were happy, and hoping that their favorite son, Barack Obama, would be the next President of the United States, as if that will somehow solve their problems...
...For my sixtieth, I hope to get smoke signals that George is to appear before the International War Crimes Tribunal...
...Saddam Hussein sentenced Sunday before the election...
...If Negroponte could have arranged it, Hussein would have been hanged on Monday...
...I count the defeat of the anti-choice measure in South Dakota, the many women elected and reelected, the likelihood of a woman, a socialist, as the next president of France...
...Before we could get more election news, we flew north to the Rift Valley, out of range and off the grid...
...There was toyi-toying by the luggage carousel...
...From Lula's new Brazil...
...Impeachment is too good for him...
...Arguing behind closed doors, then spilling, brawling into the streets...
...From Mary Robinson and Mary Patricia McAleese's Ireland...
...Maybe no more goose-stepping yes-men parroting the Republican Party line...
...Gas prices went down at the voting booth...
...Despite the mufti of Australia's pronouncement that a woman without a hijab is like a piece of raw meat, despite our exporting of fundamentalism and all its misogynist works to Canada, I sense a slight winter solstice turn toward the light...
...But here's to the nutty, messy Democrats...
...Despite the late tide of very cautious optimism, my cynicism had me worried that at the last moment the American people would again fall sheeplike for some Rovian strategery...
...Each time,inthe last six years we've traveled outofthe U.S., we've dreaded the return...
...I'll be munching New York City's own trans-fatless Freedom Fries...
...It's pluralism, baby...
...So, I'll still be smiling that night in January, when that gnarly little guy swings open that big wooden door and barks, "Madam Speaker...
...But no worries...
...Hey, Britney dumped Kevin...
...Africa is so stunningly beautiful, you can see why those chilled, old, white Europeans just had tohave it...
...Comedically, I admit to having grown lazy...
...Is it me, or is there a slight uptick for women...
...On my birthday, someone managed to pick up an errant BlackBerry signal or perhaps a drumbeat, and we heard that Rumsfeld had resigned...
Vol. 71 • January 2007 • No. 1
