The American Spectator

Current Wisdom

Current Wisdom

By Assorted Jackasses from the October 2008 issue

The Nation

The Nation reports on an ideal retirement community and spa for its nostalgic audience of left-wing boobies:

The countryside around Da Ba village in southwestern China’s Chongqing province is steep and verdant but swathed in the bitter smog of many small, coal-fired factories and power plants. These mountains are rich with veins of lignite, and because the area is only a few hours from Chongqing— the eponymous provincial capital and mega-city you’ve likely never heard of (12 million and counting)—it is dotted with small power plants, mines, quarries and cement factories that feed the metropolis.

Da Ba is in many ways a typical Chinese village. Its center has a few blocks of tightly packed two- and three-story projects of socialist-style housing nestled along a dirty creek and a cramped valley crossroads. On the edge of town, the walls of farmhouses compounds are painted with bold red characters exhorting obedience to the one-child policy.

(August 18/25, 2008)

The New Republic

Michelle Obama gets the full adolescent gush from Katherine Marsh, TNR managing editor and winner of the 2007 Scarsdale Bubble Gum Chew:

I miss the old Michelle, and I think a lot of other women do, too. Not the scripted Stepford wife fist-bumping Elisabeth Hasselbeck, but the sassy better half who reminded us that while Barack was the answer, he was also stinky in the morning and forgot to put the butter away. She both affirmed his promise and humanized him. You could actually imagine their relationship was a real thing—not a symbiotic power alliance, but a union of two different people with different goals who just happen, when they’re not bickering about the butter, to find each other pretty cool.

(August 25, 2008)

Boy Clinton

(Address to the Democratic National Convention)

Addressing the bug-eyed faithful at the Democratic National Convention, the ex-Boy President serves up another helping of the purest hooey:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

(August 27, 2008)

New York Review of Books

Letter to the Editor