Once again, she’s a key voice for the U.S. in Europe. Check out also the Nick Lemann profile in the current New Yorker. I love her visceral disdain for identity politics, her genuine pride in her own achievements, her discipline, and tenacity. I know Cheney wants to hang on, but Bush has an amazing chance to remake his party if he asks her to be his veep nominee in 2004.
THEY LIED: Another victory for Clinton’s foreign policy. He opened up a dialogue with the murderous thugs who run North Korea, and they promised only to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes. They lied, of course. And we’re stuck, once again, with the consequences of trusting them.
RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: Just take a look at this “story” from ABCNews.com, headlined: “War Worries: Support for Attacking Iraq Begins to Wane Across the U.S.” You’ll notice that the line between reporting and advocacy in this piece is non-existent. There is no data to support the headline or the thesis. There is, in fact, nothing but anecdotes sought out to prove the thesis of the article. Not a single pro-war voice is included. And the tone of the piece is quite clearly designed to counter the day when president Bush won Congressional support for the war. The piece ends: “Contrary to what the president says, when it comes to war, Americans do not speak with one voice. A national day of protest has been scheduled for Oct. 26.” I’m not sure if they broadcast this. But it’s quite simply an anti-war opinion piece.
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “When asked by worried friends and acquaintances whether the President was borrowing his geopolitical theory from the diaries of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, I assured them that the President didn’t have the patience to read more than two or three pages of a Tom Clancy novel.” – Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, in the print edition of the October issue (discovered by the More Than Zero blog.)
BAUCUS’ FLYER: A group called Montanans for Clean Campaigns have put up on their website another piece of the Montana Democratic Party’s anti-Taylor literature. This one was even sent out even after Taylor quit the race. The flyer shows a woman (or it could be a drag queen) with bright red hair (or a wig) grinning at the camera, with what looks like a fur pink boa around her neck. That image is reprinted three times on the flyer. It’s supplemented by the student loan accusations and the video-still that shows Taylor with his fingers running through a male model’s hair. It’s part of the same campaign as the now-notorious television ad. The slogan is: “At Mike Taylor’s Hair Care Schools, Someone Apart From the Customer Got Clipped.” I think this is valid supplementary evidence of what this campaign was trying to achieve. Too sissy for Montana. And the national Democrats still won’t apologize. Barney Frank’s silence is particularly deafening.
SELF-ESTEEM WATCH: More data worrying about self-esteem – from the American Psychological Association. I love the headline.
THE NYT ONLINE: Henry Copeland has amended his description of the New York Times’ online readership: the typical reader of the print edition is 45, and 56 percent of the print readers are out of the New York area.
HE LINKED! It turns out Jim Romenesko actually linked to a piece criticizing the newly leftward spin of the New York Times. I under-estimated him. Let me know the next time he does, will you?
The Dish 