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
In the goody-goody pages of NYRB, the Bush
administration receives an unanticipated laudation:
Seven years after al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, as the Bush
administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on
September 11, 2001, as a battle for America’s security became, and
continues to be, a battle for the country’s soul.…
In Charlottesville, Virginia, Philip Zelikow, the director of
the 9/11 Commission, who returned to teaching history at the
University of Virginia, tried to take stock. In time, he predicted,
the Bush administration’s descent into torture would be seen as
akin to Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World
War II.”
(August 14, 2008)
CNBC Interview with Warren Buffet
In a television interview with Becky Quick, the celebrated
Warren Buffett demonstrates the utter invincibility of modern-day
liberal hypocrisy:
Mr. BUFFETT: ... Now, what I do with politicians is I ask them
what they believe in and will work for that a majority of their
constituents oppose. Now, if they give me an answer to that, I know
they really believe that. I mean, I don’t get long answers to that
question. But what they...
QUICK: I bet you don’t.
Mr. BUFFETT: Yeah, no. But that’s the real test of what they
believe in. Anybody’s for anything that gets them elected, so if
they—if they say, “I’m for lowering your taxes,” or “I’m for
bringing all kinds of things to my district,” or “earmarking
things,” you know, of course they’re going to say that. And they’ll
say that whether they believe in it or not because it keeps their
jobs. Now, the question is what do they believe in that might
endanger their job if in—if done?
QUICK: What did Barack Obama say when you asked him that
question? You’re supporting him.
Mr. BUFFETT: Yeah. I’m not going to ask him that question.
QUICK: You haven’t asked him that question.
Mr. BUFFETT: No, I didn’t—I didn’t—I didn’t put that one to
him.
QUICK: Why not?
Mr. BUFFETT: I didn’t feel like putting him on the spot that
way.
(August 22, 2008)
Washington Post
Roly-poly syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. tenders the
sad evidence that the bare-knuckle politics of Karl Rove and Benito
Mussolini has spread to the once polite environs of the Democratic
Party, now to be practiced by Senator Joe Biden, once a 90-pound
weakling:
There is nothing dainty in Biden’s approach to politics. “He’s a
happy warrior, he loves the whole thing, but he’ll punch you out,”
a Democrat who has known him for decades said Saturday. There will
be nothing dainty in how McCain and Bush are dealt with during this
week’s convention.
(August 25, 2008)
New York Times Magazine
A lesson in recent American history from Professor T. Boone
Pickens to the little girl interviewing him for the venerable Times
of Manhattan:
Reporter Deborah Solomon: You helped re-elect Bush in ’04 when
you gave $3 million to the Swift Boat campaign to discredit John
Kerry’s Vietnam service. Do you regret your involvement?
T. Boone Pickens: Why should I?
Solomon: Because it’s such an ugly chapter in American political
history.
Pickens: Oh, I see. Well, it was true. Everything that went into
those ads was the truth.
Solomon: Really? I thought it was all invented.
(August 3, 2008)
CNN.com
Another paid political announcement from acidulous CNN
commentator Jack Cafferty, whose recent disavowals of
dipsomania are not very convincing:
It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as
our current President…. Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and
spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a
colossal failure he has been….I fear to the depth of my being that
John McCain is just like him.
(August 19, 2008)
From the Archives
Timeless Tosh from current wisdoms Past
(October 1988)
The Great Books Series
Mr. Tom Hayden, in his lubricious memoir, suggests to all
readers of a patriotic cast of mind the positive aspects of birth
control and the gruesome side of left-wing amour:
Then, on a spring day in a New York hotel room, fresh from a
trip to Vietnam, where she had seen women having children in the
face of death, Jane was moved to create life as her answer to numb
alienation. With a slight sigh, she stood behind me, naked, and
whispered, “I want to have a child with you.” With a tearful smile,
I said yes.
(From Reunion: A Memoir, by Tom Hayden, Random
House, 1988)
Mother Jones
Anthropological investigations in the first person singular
from Dr. Joel Achenbach for all the victims of substance abuse who
read Mother Jones and learn from it:
I first sensed that nothing is real anymore a few years back
during the Victory Tour by the Jacksons. For complex reasons, I
went to see them two nights in a row. The first night was great.
The second night was exactly the same. And that was the strange
thing: it was exactly the same. The dance steps were exactly the
same. The stage chatter was exactly the same. Even the spontaneity
was the same. Both nights Michael spontaneously began to cry in the
middle of a certain song.
(September 1988)
New Republic
Camelot vs. Orwell in New Orleans:
Pat Robertson…said the Democrats would have us all be in one big
family with “Teddy Kennedy as Big Brother.” Nothing wrong with
attacking Teddy, but one would have thought that jeering references
to his status as a brother would be omitted as a matter of
taste.
(September 5, 1988)
