H.L. Mencken once said “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” That quote was recalled to me today by a good friend. We were talking about something else at the time, but I couldn’t help thinking this might be a good time … Read more
Chris Elliott, one of our favorite comedians, has published his first novel. It’s called “The Shroud of the Thwacker,” and it seems to be an historical novel about a Victorian-era serial killer named Jack the Jolly Thwacker. According to the Times today, it a spoof of sensational period mysteries. But part of the novel was … Read more
They say you can judge a person by which section of the Sunday Times he reads first. On that basis, this readers is moderately schizophrenic. It depends, but if I’m running out the door, and don’t wish to lug the whole shooting match with me, I’ll normally extract the magazine, the week in review, arts … Read more
A phone call late Halloween night can reduce your head to nothing but a fat band of static, all desire creeping slowly down your body and leaking out the bottoms of your feet. This crippled world keeps pushing us further and further into our hiding places. How much more can fall off this planet before … Read more
Soon enough he’d find himself behind the wheel of a parked car again, the location as inexplicable to him as it was irrelevant, the sound of gravel still rolling in his ears. A dark little patch of the world, the moon something he was vaguely aware of, a far away place where he wished he … Read more
Like the class weakling kicking sand in the face of the vanquished playground bully, some Democrats are now tut-tutting about the “far right” torpedoing Harriet Miers. “She deserved her day in court,” Mark Shields reliably repeated last night on NewHour, David Brooks in a pink tie smirking nearby. Understandable that the left was cautiously optimistic … Read more
Neglected for almost a week: In last Saturday’s NYTimes, you might have been sidetracked by MoDo’s salvo in her brief but incandescent public catfight with JuMi. I wasn’t; I noticed that the easy-to-overlook, irenic Nick Kristof wrote at length about why we all should fear a capricious indictment (or two) from an off-the-rails independent counsel, … Read more
Apropos of Pete’s comments yesterday, I have to admit I haven’t looked at many New Times papers in recent years. I think their impulse to be politically contrarian is a good one (which is a much different thing than being anti-liberal, but that’s a whole ‘nother conversation–of course, anti-liberalism usually IS more or less disguised … Read more
Would somebody please give this guy head so we can impeach him? We weren’t cheered too much by Miers withdrawal from the Supreme Court nomination. It’s not as if Bush needed anything else to emphasize how truly out of his depth he is. I was always convinced the decision to nominate her in the first … Read more
If dogs could stand as small as humans, and on their hind legs, upright in a manner of speaking, and if they could negotiate the complexities of a phone booth and had change, or pockets for change, and if you could still find a functioning phone booth in this godforsaken city, I’d wish a lost … Read more