Category: The Dish

As McCain and Giuliani slide, Romney treads water. Enter Fred.

In Iraq, the Nebraska senator opines: "We did no shopping while we were here."

New York City, New York, 3.08 pm.

A defense of a U.S. attorney appointed by Rove et al.

What is there to say except pray for those murdered and for those who survived the rampage? I guess we’ll find out more soon. I should add I don’t think this is a particularly appropriate time to argue that gun control may have been part of the problem.

It’s a full-scale collapse. A reader writes:

Based on what my younger son, a college sophomore, and his friends tell me, the "Young Republican" organizations on many campuses are falling afoul of the same problems that created a revulsion against their political parents in the Nixon era, when I was in college. With the ascendancy of Nixon, the YR became storm troopers of the imperial presidency – doctrinaire, authoritarian, exclusive, dishonest and generally obnoxious in the way they coated their realpolitik with a transparent veneer of moral self-righteousness.

They behaved then and, I understand, behave now like a bunch of middle-aged, self-important know-it-alls around whom the stench of hypocrisy hovers like a visible fog. Or, they are perceived as too dim-witted to know any better. These characteristics, hypocrisy and stupidity, have ever been repulsive to the young and and are turning many college students today (a far more focused and pragmatic bunch than my feckless peers) sharply away from the party the YR represent.

My older son, now 25, finds the Christianist base of the party risible and pathetic. He and his friends abhor the moral and ethical vacuum at the center of the Republican Party; they sneer at the mendacity of the Administration; they shudder at the prospect of the deficit they will have to pay; they believe that the Republicans have made more dangerous the world in which they will raise their children.   

Based on what I hear from these young people, I wonder less that the the Republicans have lost support among those under 30 and more that they have any support at all.

Here’s an interview with Bryan Ferry:

Interviewer: Do you have a German work ethic?

Ferry: I want to be able to look back on a life in which I have accomplished things. That’s why I call my West London studio… actually, wait a minute. I can’t tell that to a German…

Interviewer: Fürherbunker?

Ferry: You caught me there. Normally I always make out to German journalists that I call my studio the HQ. That’s less objectionable. But the way in which the Nazis stage-managed and presented themselves, my gentlemen! I’m talking about Leni Riefenstahl films and Albert Speer’s buildings and the mass rallies and the flags – simply fantastic. Really lovely.

A reader writes:

My apolitical husband, a man who only reads the sports page and is registered to vote as an ‘Independent,’ just finished both Obama books and has declared himself for Obama. This is the first time in his life he has ever shown any interest in any political candidate. This is unheard of. There is something afoot.

I agree.

A website!

By a whisker, his listeners are better informed about the news than NPR’s (if you add the high and moderate knowledge numbers together).