Wednesday, November 12, 2003
If I Got Fewer E-Mail Dispatches, This Entry Would Be Shorter
The beautiful thing about the Internet is that your favorite site is often willing to send you a regular e-mail update regarding new material on the site. But after you subscribe to a boatload of these, your e-mail box starts to resemble one of those campus message posts peppered with notices. I had to clear out the backlog this afternoon, and here's what's left:
This week in the Village Voice, James Ridgeway summarizes John Edwards' excellent week since taking Howard Dean to task on the Confederate flag. Excellent in Edwards' eyes, anyhow, as he's gotten more publicity in the past seven days than in several months before.
Edwards has helped me understand what bugged many people about Bill Clinton. Lots of people--even some people on his side politically--saw in Clinton an offensive, smarmy, say-anything slickness. Now it seems to me that a certain degree of smarm is essential in anyone who runs for high office. In the most successful politicians, like Clinton, it's genetic and they can't hide it. Clinton's slickness also never bothered me because he was usually the smartest person in any given room, which was acknowledged even by people who didn't like him, and I'd rather have smart than dumb. But Edwards seems to have all the smarm and practically none of the substance. He may be the creature of unlimited, avaricious ambition that some people think Hillary Clinton is.
(Speaking of Hil, Ridgeway notes that the filing deadline for the New Hampshire primary is November 21, and seems to think that Hillary's appearance at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day observance on November 15 will mark some kind of watershed moment in the groundswell he claims to see for her presidential candidacy. Jim, I love your work, but you gotta get out of New York more.)
Elsewhere on the Web, TomPaine.com has reprinted some recent Senate floor remarks by South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings, a man who's been around the block a time or two and who knows a quagmire when he sees it. Hollings, speaking of the resolution permitting Bush to go to war in Iraq, said simply "I voted for the resolution. I was misled." Until the Democrats running for president who supported the war say the same thing, none of them has an ounce of credibility when they criticize Bush now. It's their war just as much as it is his.
Also on TomPaine.com, David Corn revisits the history of Ronald Reagan, anti-communist crusader. It's not pretty. And it makes me ashamed to have said nice things about Reagan last weekend.
The beautiful thing about the Internet is that your favorite site is often willing to send you a regular e-mail update regarding new material on the site. But after you subscribe to a boatload of these, your e-mail box starts to resemble one of those campus message posts peppered with notices. I had to clear out the backlog this afternoon, and here's what's left:
This week in the Village Voice, James Ridgeway summarizes John Edwards' excellent week since taking Howard Dean to task on the Confederate flag. Excellent in Edwards' eyes, anyhow, as he's gotten more publicity in the past seven days than in several months before.
Edwards has helped me understand what bugged many people about Bill Clinton. Lots of people--even some people on his side politically--saw in Clinton an offensive, smarmy, say-anything slickness. Now it seems to me that a certain degree of smarm is essential in anyone who runs for high office. In the most successful politicians, like Clinton, it's genetic and they can't hide it. Clinton's slickness also never bothered me because he was usually the smartest person in any given room, which was acknowledged even by people who didn't like him, and I'd rather have smart than dumb. But Edwards seems to have all the smarm and practically none of the substance. He may be the creature of unlimited, avaricious ambition that some people think Hillary Clinton is.
(Speaking of Hil, Ridgeway notes that the filing deadline for the New Hampshire primary is November 21, and seems to think that Hillary's appearance at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day observance on November 15 will mark some kind of watershed moment in the groundswell he claims to see for her presidential candidacy. Jim, I love your work, but you gotta get out of New York more.)
Elsewhere on the Web, TomPaine.com has reprinted some recent Senate floor remarks by South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings, a man who's been around the block a time or two and who knows a quagmire when he sees it. Hollings, speaking of the resolution permitting Bush to go to war in Iraq, said simply "I voted for the resolution. I was misled." Until the Democrats running for president who supported the war say the same thing, none of them has an ounce of credibility when they criticize Bush now. It's their war just as much as it is his.
Also on TomPaine.com, David Corn revisits the history of Ronald Reagan, anti-communist crusader. It's not pretty. And it makes me ashamed to have said nice things about Reagan last weekend.
