Oct 9, 09 | 8:55 AM
Politicians used to be fat, and voters used to be thin. This has been turned on its head: Now a fat politician is an unusual bird, while the majority of voters are corpulent beasts. Fat used to be an attribute of a successful man, suggesting power, status, and fine dining—the proverbial fat cat. A few generations ago, Teddy Kennedy would not have been an anomaly on the Senate floor. But then politics became a subset of the media business. A fat politician became as much of a non-starter as a fat anchorman. It is probably more difficult to be a fat politician than it is to be a promiscuous...
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Oct 8, 09 | 7:19 AM
It could be that in the years ahead every Italian alive in the strange years of Silvio Berlusconi, as both his nation’s leading media mogul and dominant political figure, will take a certain pride in being able to tell the tale. Grandchildren will gather round. Historians will debate the significant moments and, for years hence, be dishing out new details. And, for generations, there will be the aftereffects of the catharsis of his fall. Nixon for Americans will be a pale shade of villainy compared to Berlusconi for the Italians. Anyway, it does appear that this week is, finally, the...
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Oct 7, 09 | 10:54 AM
There are some things that happen that so cry out for parody that a buzzer goes off in the head of every humor writer on the planet. Such a thing is the Conservative Bible Project. A bunch of righties headed by Andrew Schlafly (the son of Phyllis Schlafly) are rewriting the Bible because according to them, liberal bias has contaminated all the modern translations. As soon as I heard, I immediately began writing the conservative version of the Sermon on the Mount. But then I got sidetracked by something, I don’t know, life, I think, and by the time I got back to my Bible shtick,...
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Oct 7, 09 | 8:25 AM
The commander in chief has taken the first step toward spelling out his war strategy in Afghanistan. Or, really, by avoiding a specific strategy, he is embracing a radical new one. The New York Times reports that in a bipartisan meeting at the White House the president said he wanted to “dispense with the straw man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan.” (This is, anyway, the official White House version of what he said.) This is enough of a repudiation of much of the best thinking on regional wars to come close to being an Obama...
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Oct 6, 09 | 9:17 AM
Should I be worried about Glenn Beck? In my long experience, when advertisers boycott media it’s media that’s too out there in a too-permissive liberal-lefty sort of way. I can’t actually remember in the history of modern media a boycott of something because it’s too conservative. But that’s what’s happening to Beck. Nice-guy-oriented consumer brands are ganging up and pulling their ads from his show. In the beginning this seemed like some savvy brand manager’s publicity stunt, but it’s spreading and becoming something like a determined...
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Oct 5, 09 | 2:42 PM
Dear Dave: I was sorry to hear you admitting on television that you’d had sex. A prominent person like yourself should never admit to having sex and probably is best off not even having it in the first place. Whenever I’ve heard a public figure admit to sex, it meant he was in trouble. (Perhaps I should say “he or she” but it’s almost always a he, isn’t it?) Eliot Spitzer talked about having sex and the next thing you know, he wasn’t the governor of New York anymore. Upon replacing him, David Patterson announced that he had had sex, too, and...
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Oct 5, 09 | 9:34 AM
Part of the post-mortem on the Letterman-sex-and-shakedown story is about the damage he might have done to his female audience. Women may stop watching him with the same consistency or attention because he wasn't monogamous. The implication is that the women of America have an instinctive sympathy for the person he was supposed to be having sex with (his girlfriend of long-standing, Regina Lasko, the mother of his child, who he finally married this year) and that they feel and share her pain at the betrayal, even though, in this case, we don’t know what she feels. In addition, the...
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Oct 2, 09 | 11:46 AM
David Letterman drove a stake into the heart of the blackmail business last night. He not only blew the whistle on a would-be extorter, choosing instead to confess his dalliances with staffers on national television, he made fun of the guy. He told the story brilliantly, keeping the audience laughing as it slowly dawned on them that this was not a joke. Or that it actually was a joke, but the joke was on the extortionist. “Hinky” is the word Letterman used, a couple of times, to describe the scheme, and the perpetrator. Perfect putdown. He did, indeed, have...
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Oct 2, 09 | 8:02 AM
Barack Obama is an uplifting but, so far, ultimately boring story. The greatest political saga, the one that has it all, that gets to the real heart of American politics, is the John Edwards story. It’s too bad that, for reasons of shock-shocked morality and heavy political correctness, we can’t really revel in it. All good people are required to turn away and express no interest in this tawdry tale. But, in our primness, we’re missing something major, and real, and tortured, and spectacular. This isn’t just politics, it’s literature. It’s the great...
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Oct 1, 09 | 3:28 PM
In political/media circles, the standard buzz phrase for Alan Grayson, for those of you who (like me) never heard of our new liberal Rambo before his big chart-wielding media breakthrough on the floor of the House Tuesday night, is that he’s The Congressman from the Blogosphere. Which is to say, he’s loud, in your face, and snarky. It is the last term in the series that differentiates Grayson from his many headline-grabbing Republican counterparts, who are loud, in your face, and insane. The GOP Congressional leadership, not being conversant with snark, irony, sarcasm, or...
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