Interesting piece by Rick Berke today, channeling Clinton’s buddies about what the ex-president thinks of the new one. Some familiar complaints, but all in all, Clinton, who’s no dummie, gets Bush better than most of his fellow Democrats. “”The thing that struck me the most was he said, `Don’t underestimate President Bush; he’s a formidable force,’ ” said Llewellyn Wells, the producer of “The West Wing.”” My prediction is that the main buzz from this piece will be in Britain. What is Clinton doing still on the phone with Tony Blair? Undermining his relationship with George W. Bush?
BUSTED: I found out today that George W. Bush has installed a big bust of Dwight Eisenhower in the Oval Office. Why am I not surprised?
NO MORE CHADS: The New York Times story about Florida’s funding of a complete overhaul of its election equipment to go to a universal optical scanning system is a case-study in the paper’s sadly increasing bias. “It would also require that ballots in extremely close elections be recounted by hand – the very practice that Florida election officials and the Bush campaign had opposed so fiercely last year in their battle with Democrats who were insisting that manual recounts would tip the election to Al Gore,” the Times reporter opines. But the main reason for opposing hand-counts last time was because the standards for determining voter intent in punch-card ballots was so haphazard. Yes, some Republicans opportunistically opposed any hand-counting at all. But the bulk of the opposition was because of the subjective nature of recounting chads. The new system will eliminate that entirely. The Times can’t even resist pointing out that Jeb Bush’s statement supporting the notion that every Floridian’s vote should count “echoed the mantra of the Democrats last year, when Mr. Gore pleaded with state officials and the courts to “count every vote.”” Does Al Gore now have a copyright on clichés? It’s only deep in the piece that we get the real details of what the change will be. But not until Democratic Party propaganda is ladeled out in spoonfuls.
MONUMENTALISM: Good news from Washington that the proposed, massive, completely over-sized World War II memorial is going to be reconsidered. What a relief. The World War II generation surely deserves an important and stirring monument. But the current design would have wrecked the sightlines from the Washington monument to the Lincoln Memorial and was lugubrious and pretentious in the extreme. One of the true joys of the Mall is its open space – the green vista that sweeps down the small hill on which the Washington momument stands to the reflecting pool to Lincoln and beyond. The current plan would have been the equivalent of a nail on a chalkboard to that breath-taking view. Time for a second look.
The Dish 