Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

Actually the most glaring trait of small town life in Pennsylvania is a fondness for smoking; but then Obama couldn’t mention that now could he?

 

Michael Novak explains why Benedict does not fit easily into the American right-left politico-religious rubric. Among the moral issues that Novak does not discuss is torture. Count me unsurprised. The cognitive dissonance on that one can sometimes be a little much for theocon Bush-supporters.

Has the Pennsylvania primary turned bitter? Blumenthal and Franklin look at the tea-leaves. Currently, there’s not much to go on.

The McCain girls were a hoax. Damn.
 

Not advice in campaigning against the Clintons.

Nah: we don’t need a conversation about race in America, do we?

A blogger in love with libraries. There is something erotic about these places – and I don’t mean the occasional tryst in the stacks. The space you read in matters. When I think back of my fondest reading memories, several are in the Bodleian at Oxford and the Widener at Harvard. The hush of the reading rooms, the turn-on of a great book, the spasm of what you thought was an original thought, which lasts about as long as a male orgasm: it’s better than porn.

Hilzoy counters Michael Medved’s article against an atheist president. By the way, it’s "hug-an-atheist" day.

A nugget from ARG’s new PA poll showing Clinton with a 20 point lead:

23% of likely primary voters say that excessive exposure to Obama’s advertising is causing them to support Clinton. This compares to 19% of likely primary voters in Ohio who said that excessive exposure to Obama’s advertising in that state caused them to support Clinton.

Heh. That should teach them. But it won’t.

Rick Hertzberg:

Along with its various derivatives, ‘misspeak’ has become one of the signature verbal workhorses of this interminable political season, right up there with ‘narrative,’ ‘Day One,’ and ‘hope.’ It carries the suggestion that, while the politician’s perfectly functioning brain has dispatched the correct signals, the mouth has somehow received and transmitted them in altered form. ‘Misspeak’ is a powerful word, a magical word. It is a word that is apparently thought capable, in its contemporary political usage, of isolating a palpable, possibly toxic untruth, sealing it up in an airtight bag, and disposing of it harmlessly.

(Hat tip: Goddard).