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)