Clinton, just build some houses already.
Asked his perspective on how the country fell into such economic hard times, Clinton responded in an NBC ''Today'' show interview by asking rhetorically: ''Did any of them seriously believe that if I had been president and my economic team had been in place the last eight years, that this would be taking place.''
In another interview, Clinton was asked which president he would most identify with.
Whoooaaa, A-Rod. Stop the tape. For the record, he was pumped up on steroids and other drugs from ages 26 through 28, while the highest-paid player in baseball, with a 10-year, $252 million contract.
He was a man in full, but wants us to think of him as a boy. He was a corporation unto himself, a very calculated one at that. He cheated to get an edge. Then he lied about it.If anyone deserves a young and stupid pass it’s Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer who was caught in a pose not unknown to anyone his age — snout inside a bong.
Phelps seemed contrite in trotting out his young and stupid defense. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way,” he said.
More like youthful and appropriate. I have a hard time going after him for taking a hit of pot after he spent most of his life as a robo-athlete.Hey, or we could stop making Secretary of State a pity job and take diplomacy more seriously, y/y?
NYT: Clinton Decision Holding Up Other Obama Choices
Speaking of which: If Mrs. Clinton does not end up at State, then Jim Steinberg, the former deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration, is at the top of the list for the national security adviser job. Mr. Steinberg could even get the job if Mrs. Clinton takes Secretary of State, Democratic aides say, although some consideration might be given to whether Mr. Steinberg has the heft to keep Mrs. Clinton’s outsized personality in check.
When 11,000 pages of Mrs. Clinton’s public schedule as first lady were released back in March, Mr. Craig said they showed that Mrs. Clinton was out of the loop when critical foreign policy decisions were made and that her trips abroad were largely ceremonial.
In regards to the causes of atheism, there are a number of reasonable explanations for atheism:
Thirty miles to the north, in Salt Lake City, adherents of a religion called Summum gather in a wood and metal pyramid hard by Interstate 15 to meditate on their Seven Aphorisms, fortified by an alcoholic sacramental nectar they produce and surrounded by mummified animals.
In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, “similar in size and nature” to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.
The city declined, a lawsuit followed and a federal appeals court ruled that the First Amendment required the city to display the Summum monument. The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in the case, which could produce the most important free speech decision of the term.Your good bride? Awesome night? The great journeys of life? I promise?
And yet I don't feel any intense hate for this flawed, flawed man. Cheney, as usual, is off Washington grounds, hiding in South Dakota in a tiny town of 1,352 people called Gettysburg.
Barack Obama has written that his views began to take shape in the back streets of Jakarta, where he lived as a young boy and saw the poverty, the human rights violations and the fear inspired by the American-backed Indonesian dictator Suharto.
It was there, Mr. Obama wrote in his second autobiography, that he first absorbed the “jumble of warring impulses” that make up American foreign policy, and received a street-level understanding of how foreigners react to “our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism” and to Washington’s “tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption and environmental degradation.”
As the campaigns tell the story, those radically different experiences in different corners of Southeast Asia have created two men with sharply different views about the proper use of American power."
Not that that's the only reason I hate Garrison Keillor. The main reason, actually, is that I don't think he's funny (I don't think most writers are - if you know anybody that writes like Hot Fuzz, though, let me know - that's stuff that Garrison Keillor would find crass, by the way). I'm sure he thinks he's funny, but he is essentially writing to himself, and he is a boring, boring man. Some people call him absurd. He's not absurd. Catch-22 is absurd. This guy just writes about mediocre things that could definitely happen any day in any town in a totally passion-less manner. What he really wants you to do is look down on everyone, to sneer at them derisively, to share in his resentment that stems from nothing (because seriously, what the fuck does this guy have to complain about?), to basically be a bitter, sullen, cocky old man with a shriveled up soul who places joy in bygone things so that he can never find joy again.
I also don't like his attitude. He's one of those people who says "you young people" and bemoans fast food and thinks, hilariously, that Minnesota provides a "test of one's mettle". He likes things like civility and dislikes things like lines in airports. I can't think of a better way to describe him than "small-minded". He's a big fish in a small pond - I don't know if he's even left the country - and smugly smirks at all the other fish in the pond, mocking them for moving on with the 21st Century. He mocks power and the people who have it but doesn't want it himself, oh no - politics is hopeless and you are all idiots, but don't give the hot potato to me. So what? Is anarchy the solution? Jimmy Carter was a nice guy, but a terrible president. I don't even like the way this guy criticizes the Republicans, and that's saying something for me. Like this gem: "McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in a department store window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer."
This is called a man who profoundly misunderstands national politicians, and a lot of liberals in my hometown revel in his haphazard, uninformed commentary. These are people who, you know, go to the Unitarian Church and give money to Nebraskans for Peace and live in comfortable houses and send their kids to Stanford and go to Jazz in June concerts and occasionally go to films that screen at the independent college theater (but nothing too disturbing!). People completely mired in their own self-satisfied complacency, happy that they are miles above the wretched rednecks who they think surround them. When these people criticize Bush it's hollow because they don't know what the hell they're talking about - they just get all blustery and crazy, and they convince no one of anything except that they think Bush is an idiot, though why he's an idiot, who knows. There's this conception in the Liberal Midwest that Bush really is a president in a diaper and for some reason, he's just being allowed to randomly blow countries or welfare programs up by his goons who refuse to check him. (Molly Ivins, from Texas, was guilty of proliferating this interpretation of Bush too) But of course this isn't true - politics are a lot more complicated than that, and no amount of hysterical hand-wringing will make a difference. In fact it'll just hurt the hand-wringers. Bush needs to be taken in historical and international context - but taking things in context is something that Midwestern Liberals are totally incapable of. They are the best representation of the worst trait in liberals: absolutism. Incredible, fanatical absolutism, the stuff that they think belongs to Puritans because they don't see it in themselves. I have developed a newfound respect for Neo-Cons at college - I disagree with their goals, but they are at least not self-righteous, moral absolutists (they pretend to be, sometimes, when it benefits them; this is a ruse) who refuse to play a role in the world. Midwestern Liberals are laughably clueless when it comes to anything that is not their whitewashed suburb in their whitewashed state. They know nothing of the world and they're fine with that, because what's America doing try to do things in the world? Grumble grumble. Shuffle shuffle.
As some guy says, "I can't stand motherfuckers from Minnesota and Wisconsin who think they know jazz, and would like to lecture me on race relations."
If some of these stupid whiners ran for office, I'd respect them more. If they tried to do fucking ANYTHING with their lives, I'd respect them more. Instead they just spend their money, little by little by very little, complaining about high prices all the way, pat the heads of some disabled/black kids, mock celebrities who don't even know they exist, complain about the internet, buy organic coffee, make plans to go to some screening of a weepy movie about Afghanistan, buy some books at Barnes & Noble, and write columns about how the nation is going to shit unless Americans can dredge up the small-town values that make us great and hold some massive national potluck. They are the people who need to hear CRY MOAR the most. I'm sure they think by voting they're doing some good in the world. I'm also sure they whine about jury duty.
They're one of two groups of people, it seems to me, who just truly can't wait to die and get the fuck off this planet and hate everyone on it. The other group is the Evangelical Right. Seriously, Midwestern Liberals have more in common with them than they'd like to think.
For a completely different but very good reason to hate on Garrison Keillor, read this article.
Sadly, the only people who can criticize Garrison Keillor are conservatives, who usually just say he's being a liberal elitist. Which, of course, he is.
But the fact is, anybody who tries to own and embody an entire region - as Garrison Keillor has basically annexed the Midwest, especially for the entertainment of coastal liberals, who see his folksy stupidity as an endearing representation of liberals in the Great Plains - is a sadly deluded egomaniac.
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winterfish
