Archive Listing
May 1, 2005 - April 24, 2005
Sunday, May 23, 2004
If we'd a little more advance notice we could have been better prepared. As it is, we haven't read the book and don't own a copy. It's called Big Russ & Me and it's about him and his father. Or so we've heard. A few hundred times. But our disconcerting habit of dropping off to sleep when Tim starts talking has deprived us of the details. Fortunately, though, the Internet is brimming with Russert entries (76,000+), so we found a review in the New Yorker. After two of three longish opening paragraphs about himself and his father, reviewer Nicholas Lemann finally brought up the subject of Russert and his book. He said:
Big
Russ & Me is not so much a self-examination, or even a
dad-examination—very little in it could be honestly described as
interesting—as it is a highly effective extension of the Russert brand.
The book is written with Bill Novak, the celebrity ghostwriter, who is
credited as “full partner.” The brand wouldn’t be so successful if it
weren’t genuinely appealing, and Russert in these pages is
characteristically forthright, unpretentious, respectful, and
values-laden. And Big Russ himself functions less as a vivid character
in a book than as an enhancer of his son’s mystique. Big Russ, it turns
out, is a name conferred by Tim Russert on his father, not something
that his friends called him. The senior Russert’s real name is—Tim
Russert. At least nominally, he’s an invention of his son. Big Russ
fades out somewhat as the book goes on, but every appearance, while
presented as being illustrative of his good qualities (no filial
ambivalence here!), literarily performs the function of making Tim look
good, by reassuring us that he’s permanently connected to a father lode
of realness.
One gets the feeling Lemann would have been happier if Russert had
written a book called Nick & His
Dad, but that doesn't seem reasonable to us, much like the rest
of the tripe in the New Yorker
these days. Our advice -- strongly supported, we might add, by the
endorsements we received from the RME -- would be to disregard Mr.
Lemann's somewhat arch analysis and buy the damn book. Tim's going to
be on every talk show, game show, and news magazine until you do.
We'd like to offer some new information about Tim himself, just to
prove what great researchers we are. We hunted around quite a bit and
discovered that Tim was born on May 7, so this really is his month.
Journalists seem to admire him, but not all of the audience does. Some
of his critics know that he's a shill for the Republicans. We found
this out from a college senior named Andy
who wants to be a recording company executive. His site is worth
reading because rarely in our experience has any writer said the same
thing so many times in virtually the same language. Some of Tim's
critics know that he's a shill for the Democrats. We learned this at a
site called BoycottLiberalism.com,
which sounds like an interesting idea. It also sounds like it's not
working.
What else? Tim has his own page at the
International Movie Database site. He has played himself in a TV show
on at least one occasion. At another site called MediaWhoresOnline.com,
Tim has the honor of being listed as the Number One media whore. Not
bad for a kid from Buffalo who went to Canisius High School, eh?
We know we haven't done nearly enough by this superstar luminary of
journalism. The truth is, we just never really paid much attention to
him before. Way back in our Year 2000 edition of Shuteye Nation, we put down
everything we knew at the time.
Tim Russet. Leading TV
journalist and host of Meat
for the Press. Is he the potato Dan Quail
couldn't spell? No? Oh. That's all we had to say about him for now.
Obviously we were wrong about the potato thing, which we're sorry
about. But it doesn't leave us much more to say. We'll try to do better
next time around.
Bush's mountain bike (top or left) and Kerry's Cape Cod cruiser (bottom or right)
"He had minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees," Duffy said. "Dr. Tubb, who was with him, cleaned his scratches, said he was fine. The Secret Service offered to drive him back to the house. He declined and finished his ride."
Bush was wearing his bike helmet and a mouth guard when the mishap occurred. Duffy said he didn't know exactly how the accident happened.
"It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," the spokesman said. "You know this president. He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."
Unaccountably, Bush failed to curse at the Secret Service agents who witnessed his tumble. Further, he failed to claim that he never falls. The White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, wouldn't confirm that these mental lapses were being studied by the president's physicians, though a Kerry campaign aide questioned the administration's reticence on this point, noting that the Secret Service has not announced an investigation of the offending bike.
"If it's not the fault of Secret Service agents or the bike," said the aide, "then the accident can only be due to the president's own deficiencies. These should be looked into by qualified specialists for the good of the nation."
Following a bicycle mishap suffered by Kerry some weeks ago, the senator's custom-built Cape Cod cruiser was investigated, determined to be culpable, and "put down humanely," according to the Kerry campaign's press office.
Moore tried his best to take a bow at the Cannes Film Festival
In one sense he dodged a bullet. Fahrenòut 9/11 narrowly edged out the second place winner, Fallacie 3/11, a documentary by French filmmaker Phillipe de Grenouille proving that the recent terror attack in Spain was not provoked by Franco-European appeasement and corruption. The work drew ovations almost as long as Moore's, particularly in sequences featuring the animated disembowelling of George W. Bush and some of the longest anti-American screeds by French politicians ever put on film.
In another sense, Moore didn't quite dodge a bullet. Racing for his connecting flight to New York at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, Moore lumbered through the pride and joy of modern French architecture known as Terminal 2E. The ensuing disaster has been covered in detail elsewhere, but it can be reported that Moore suffered no more than a few "cuts and bruises."
Terminal 2E moments after Moore hurried through it
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Tornadoes are going to destroy Los Angeles
Friday, May 21, 2004
First, he lit into the Senior Panderer from Arizona:
Asked Wednesday about McCain's remarks, Hastert, who was rejected for military service because of a bad shoulder, first joked: "Who? Where's he from? A Republican?"
Then, more seriously, he said: "If you
want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and
women at Walter Reed and Bethesda (two Washington area military
hospitals). There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make
sure that they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the
wherewithal to be able to do it. And at the same time, we have to react
to keep this country strong not only militarily but economically. We
want to be able to have the flexibility to do it. That's my reply to
John McCain."
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said Pelosi "has the right to disagree with President Bush.''
"But her comments
questioning the
president's competence cross the line,
'' Hastert said. "Was it incompetence that put Saddam Hussein in jail?
Was it incompetence that disbanded the Taliban? Was it incompetence
that spurred the fastest economic growth rate in 20 years? Was it
incompetence that created the highest home ownership rate in history?''
We doubt that he'll choose to go another
round with McCain, but this is quite a lot of progress, considering
what we said about him in Shuteye Nation back in 2000:
The Speaker Guy. The
second most powerful man in the United States of Ameria, which means
that
we must be talking about, uh, uh...
Is it Humbert? Hissifit? Uh, sorry, can't think of it just now. If you
find out, please let us know.
So we finally know his name, but we
still can't figure out what's behind this unprecedented bravery. Is it
Wheaties? Steroids? Or is it just that all the screaming and shrieking
from the anti-Bush crowd interrupted his four-year nap? We'll let you
know if we find out anything, but we're pretty confident that any show
of guts by Republicans in Congress must be an aberration, not a trend.
Having tried this particular exercise, I tend to agree.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
THE FUTURE. There is something I call the invisible parenthetical. It shows up most often in election analysis, though not exclusively. It also makes intermittent appearances in assessments of the Iraq War. Its purpose is to signify that can of worms which remains stubbornly unopened. There's a good example in Tony Blankley's latest column:
But all this potential capacity for victory can only be brought into full being by a sustained act of collective will. It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently — although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)
It's the second parenthetical we're concerned with here, the one that alludes to the radical change in circumstances represented by another 9/11, or larger, attack. Blankley's diction differs from most in that he doesn't use the word 'if'; it's clear he has no doubt that it's coming, and the only question is when. Whether we admit it or not, I believe most of us agree with this gloomy prediction. We know that our borders are still porous, the INS still can't keep track of all those expired student visas, and increasingly, the various Islamo-fascist terror plots in other parts of the world are reported to involve the supposedly nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Was it the mass media's deliberate intention or our collective turning away that caused the bomb plot in Jordan to disappear so quickly from public view? A plan to kill as many as 80,000 people with explosives and chemical agents -- does this not merit our interest?
That's why I call it the invisible parenthetical. It's there in plain sight, the asterisk that says everything we're thinking about right now could be rendered void in a single moment, but we're not going to think about that right now. Politicians and pundits put it in almost ritually, as if they were knocking wood to keep bad luck away, but the ballooning dimensions of horror that live inside the mention are closed off from scrutiny by protective brackets.
But I have another name for it too: the presidential parenthetical. From this perspective, it's the clearest indication of just how far away most of us are from seeing the world situation the way President Bush has to see it. For him the "next attack" can be no aside or sotte voce appendix. It is, in many respects, the only topic of importance. We don't like to imagine, but he has to imagine, the reality and the cascading consequences of an attack that kills 80,000 Americans.
What happens on that day? Compared to its impact 9/11 will be seen in hindsight as only a ripple, a warning not heeded. There won't be space in 10 years of New York Times editions to honor the dead with individual eulogies. Panic and the interdependencies of technological infrastructure will plunge the United States, and the world, into an instant economic depression.. If such an event were to happen the day after tomorrow or the day after a month from now, what would become of all our earnest editorializing about Abu Ghraib, the role of the U.N., the shocking $25 billion overrun in occupation costs, the need to win hearts and minds in the 'moderate' Muslim world, the dangers of the patriot act, the disputed basis of the war in Iraq, the jobless recovery, gas prices, the 9/11 commission report, and Bush's attendance record in the National Guard?
All would be swept away. We would confront images of death so widespread that almost everyone in the country would know one of the victims personally. A major city would be paralyzed, gripped in a sudden crisis of survival as water, electricity, food, and medical care became unavailable for hundreds of thousands of citizens. The president would confront a near universal demand for revenge on a massive, nuclear scale. Pundits who are at this moment writing sober columns about the need for Rumsfeld's dismissal will propose lists of targets -- Mecca, Medina, Damascus -- requiring immediate annihilation. Those who continue to oppose self defense on the basis that America somehow deserves the wrath of dark age fanatics (there will be some, and you can meet them today at Moveon.org and Democraticunderground.com) (but notice who's parenthetical now) will be reviled and persecuted by people who once marched with them in anti-war demonstrations. The editorial columns of newspapers will bulge with indignant outcries about why it is taking so long to retaliate, to seal our borders, to clamp down on the Arab autocracies who are breeding mass murderers with impunity. And when the evidence indicates that the plot was hatched and harbored in Iran (Syria), the chattering experts will demand to know why nothing was done before it was too late.
Does this day of transformation seem far-fetched? Of course it doesn't. We the people just don't want to think about it. Maybe we can't think about it. But the President of the United States has to think about it. It is already real to him. He experienced 9/11 from the perspective that none of us has had, as the one who is responsible for leading the country through the mess. He knows what that is like, which is why we can demean his intelligence all we want to in our hubris; the truth is, in this respect, he is the only intelligent person among us right now. He knows that every sacrifice is worth making to prevent that impending horrific day from coming. He knows that America the Free is impossible to defend through sheer defense. That's why he took the fight to the terrorists at once and why it doesn't matter which reason he picked for taking out Saddam. He fought in Iraq the way the allies fought in North Africa in 1942, because it was a way to engage the enemy right now. He knows it doesn't matter if the Europeans whine and splutter because they will wail with misery after the economic crash caused by mass death in the land of the hated Americans.
What does he see that we don't? Body bags. Thousands upon thousands, if not millions, of the slippery black lozenges that used to be mothers, fathers, children, marines, airmen, and seamen, bags filled and buried on his watch in such numbers that the casualties we are experiencing now seem not reckless but prefatory, the scattered shots of the phony war in the days before blitzkrieg awakened a sleeping nation.
We must try to see those body bags too. If we can't, all our convictions about what's right, what's wrong, what's important, what isn't, are likely to be wrong. Dead wrong.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
JOBS AND SUCH. One of our faithful readers has written in to ask InstaPunk to say a few words about the economy. The Democrats keep talking about how bad the economy is, he notes, even though the economy is doing well by most measures. And they're hammering George Bush every day about all the jobs that have been lost. What, he wonders, does InstaPunk think about all this?
Well, InstaPunk laughs whenever a politician uses the word "I" and the term "create jobs" in the same sentence. What images come to mind when John Kerry intones, "I will create 20 million new jobs in eight years"? A Hollywood montage of Kerry in a hardhat digging the first shovelful of earth in a new dam project, Kerry bent over blueprints of a new supertanker at the shipyard, Kerry in a surgical mask supervising the manufacture of the newest and fastest microprocessor yet, Kerry in a straw hat piloting a John Deere tractor in the fields of Iowa, Kerry with his thinking cap on, devising the next high technology industry that will fuel years of economic growth...
It's all ridiculous. Presidents don't create jobs. They don't run the economy. They have less power over it than the federal reserve chairman does. They have a few tools they can use to try to influence the economy, although most of these consist of asking congress to spend more or less money, cut or raise taxes, and monkey with the minimum wage. Beyond this, they can negotiate trade agreements and serve a facilitating role in finding overseas markets for American business. And that's about it.
Now let us consider all the things a president has no control over. He can't do much , for example, about droughts, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other acts of God or demons. He can't do much about the billions of good and bad decisions made by companies and entrepreneurs in their day to day pursuit of prosperity. He also can't do much about the global economy that everywhere impacts American business prospects.
He certainly can't do anything about the stagnant European economy, which depresses the overseas opportunity for American business. The Europeans work about 35 hours a week, show up about 200 days a year, and make exorbitantly high wages so they can pay the exorbitantly high taxes that pay for all the Europeans who don't work at all. On top of this, the Europeans have a steeply declining birth rate. Their economies aren't going to be growing anytime soon.
The president can't do anything about the boom and bust cycles of the Asian economies, which are currently more bust than boom because they tend to be chronically lacking in either natural resources (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore) or capital (China, Phillipines, Malaysia).
He can't do much about the other American economies either. Canada is locked into a socialist bureaucracy that spends money faster than Canadians can earn it. Mexico's only economic strategy is sending all its workers here, because there aren't any jobs at home. South America suffers from European-style lethargy combined with the kind of political stability one might expect from the Phillipines.
The old Soviet states still don't have any economies to speak of, just gangsters and crude barter systems. They can't seem to do anything about it. How could the American president?
And no one can do anything about Africa.
The biggest economic role played by a president of the United States is to take the blame when things go south and to (try to) take credit when things go well.
The funniest part of all of this is that everyone knows it. Every four years, though, we go through this period of hysterical amnesia in which we abandon common sense and converse gravely about how well or poorly the president has "managed" the economy.
Bah. That's what InstaPunk says.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Black is the fashion color this year at Cannes -- if your surname is Moore or Kerry.
Maybe there's something special in the air at the French Riviera that sunders men from their judgment and insight. Or maybe it's more pedestrian than that: too much eye candy simply rots the higher processing functions of the brain.
At any rate, it's time for a reminder about Michael Moore. His Lowness has not merely been criticized in the past. He has been taken apart, exposed as a fraudulent documentarian, and proven a vicious slanderer. Left-leaning Spinsanity.com has found egregious errors and misrepresentations in his written works. And a law professor named David T. Hardy has deconstructed Moore's malefic sleight of hand in film works such as Bowling for Columbine. Hardy has also undertaken a dispassionate analysis of the pathological nature of Moore's personality, allowing readers to decide for themselves whether Moore is a malignant narcissist or a full blown sociopath.
We're not going to acknowledge Moore every time he raises his hand for more attention. But from time to time we will repost these links because no one should make the mistake of assuming that we're dealing with a garden variety leftist here. We're dealing with someone who may be purely evil. We do assume that Professor Hardy will continue with his excellent work.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
The one-eyed terminator from Philadelphia ices the competition at Pimlico.
HORSE TIME. Philadelphia claims him, but so does Salem County, New Jersey. He lived here before he began his racing career. Now it looks as if the whole country is ready to claim him. The Associated Press says:
His victory in the Kentucky Derby was merely impressive. But his triumph in the Preakness Stakes was the horse racing equivalent of a one-punch knockout.There's also this eerie quote in the Chicago Sun Times:
A small colt of humble origins, unbeaten Smarty Jones cast himself as a possible great when he blew away his rivals in yesterday's 1900m Preakness to win by a race-record 11 1/2 lengths over Rock Hard Ten before a record crowd of 112,668.Next stop the Belmont Stakes on June 6, when he will be poised to become only the 12th Triple Crown winner and first since Affirmed pulled off a sweep in 1978. Not bad for a horse who knocked himself unconscious, and nearly lost his life, when he bashed his head into the starting gate before running in his first race.
Now he's eight-for-eight and on the cusp of joining racing's legends.
Said Servis: ''You know, I saw an interview where Billy Turner [the trainer of Seattle Slew] said that as the Triple Crown [sequence] went on, he noticed an incredible transformation in his horse as he approached the paddock before these races. It was almost as if the horse was transforming himself into something incredible, something fantastic. I looked at Smarty today and that's what I sensed. For the first time, I really felt I was witnessing what Billy was talking about.''All of this makes Smarty Jones the equine equivalent of a South Street Punk. Shammadamma.
