Category: The Dish

A.B. Stoddard:

It is time to consider whether Hillary and Bill Clinton are actually as smart as we thought they were.

Stretch, sleep and take time away from the laptop. Pretty basic stuff. But what to do when, as now seems the case with yours truly, you’re battling the flu in the middle of a presidential campaign?

A poignant McCain moment.

South Park always helps:

But this YouTube is scary.

W. Thomas Smith Jr quits the publication:

After much reflection and consideration, I am withdrawing from my professional relationship as a regular freelancer with National Review Online.

This is my own decision. No one at NRO has asked me to do this, nor has anyone suggested or even hinted I should. But I believe this to be in the best interest of the publication which I have so much respect for.

Both NRO and I have taken far too much heat for something which would never have happened had I been more specific in terms of detailing my sourcing while blogging about Lebanon at "The Tank". That is a responsibility I have to accept.

It was an honor to write for NRO. NRO has stood by me and supported me throughout all of this, and for that — and for so many other things over the years — I will always be grateful. And I will always cherish my relationship with NRO.

… but Brad Pitt is in the next stall:

This can’t be encouraging:

Once, Garry Thomas counted himself a Hillary Clinton supporter — even signing up to be one of her 25 co-chairs in Iowa alongside with former Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack. But Thomas now says he felt obliged to switch sides in recent weeks. "I think the Clinton campaign went negative," Thomas said in a telephone interview on Thursday. He attributed his defection to the new tone Clinton took last weekend, describing it as divisive. Obama officials said Thomas committed to them this week.

A reader writes:

Thanks for posting the Kennedy speech. I had never seen or heard it before, but have now played it several times. Being just over 30 years old, the only political speeches I recall are Bush II, Clinton, Bush I, and vaguely Reagan. None of them, not one, captured my attention like the Kennedy speech.

In my studies, I understand the president to be the face of the nation. He is not a law-maker, or a general, but someone who embodies what our country is all about. A figure who instills spirit in the citizens and encourages foreign leaders to follow our example.

When did this change? From my perspective, this changed on November 22, 1963.

After a religion-soaked day yesterday, it was a relief to read this:

[Fred Thompson] said he gained his values from "sitting around the kitchen table" and said he did not plan to speak about his religious beliefs on the stump. "I know that I’m right with God and the people I love," he said, according to Bloomberg News Service. It’s "just the way I am –  not to talk about some of these things."

Please stay the way you are, Fred.

The old clubs may be dying, but a new one is being born:

In less than three months, the Estate’s weekly Thursday night party – called the Glamorous Life – has grown into one of the most frenzied and fizzy gay nights in the city. Glistening shirtless male dancers stationed on perches high over the dance floor thrust along to the beat. On the floor below, a racially diverse – by Boston standards, at least – mix of young professionals, collegians, and a smattering of men who probably should have gone to sleep after "Grey’s Anatomy," flail along to the music.

Yep: gay hip-hop. Love it. Bob Mould’s and Rich Morel’s "BlowOff" in DC (and occasionally in NYC) has also charted new ground by appealing to bears and mixing rock and pop. But my sense is that we will soon witness an eruption of openly gay culture within the black and Latino populations. Repressed for so long, and still less public than white gay culture, minority gay culture, already vibrant, may achieve greater visibility. I sure hope so. We desperately need strong public gay role models for black and Latino gay kids, who deal with stress and discrimination many of us white guys no longer experience in quite the same way.