THE EMPIRE SLAPPED BACK

Bill Clinton performed an enormous public service for all Americans this Friday, as he made mincemeat of one of Fox's "journalist" goons who - surprise - tried blaming Clinton for September 11th, to his face. The goon in question was Chris Wallace, son of Mike Wallace. Fitting, indeed, for a Wallace to be on the receiving end of a well-deserved lecture.

Keith Olbermann chimed in today:

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"And finally tonight, a Special Comment about President Clinton’s interview. The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back. It is not important that the current President’s "portable public chorus" has described his predecessor’s tone as "crazed." (That word is the reason why Republicans do not let most of the people who are the powerbrokers in their party from speaking at the Republican National Convention year after year, so they would know from it).


Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as Al-Qaeda; the nation’s "marketplace of ideas" is being poisoned, by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit. Nonetheless.

The headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done, in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

"At least I tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. "That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried."

Thus in his supposed emeritus years, has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by anyone, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama Bin Laden before 9/11. (Indeed, John Ashcroft dismissed terrorism as a priority, and instead focused his efforts on... the War on Drugs and the War on Pornography).
The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.
The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."
The Bush Administration… did… not… try.—

Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest "pass" for incompetence and malfeasance, in American history!

President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs — some of them, 17 years old — before Pearl Harbor.

President Hoover was correctly blamed for — if not the Great Depression itself — then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash.

Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War — though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But not this President.

To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11th, 2001 — or the nearly eight months that preceded it.
That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the Executive.

But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.

Except… for this:

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts — that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News, Friday afternoon.

Consider the timing: The very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is — not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it!(Indeed, the NIE findings, made and vetted by Bush's own administration, were made public the day before the interview).

The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.

It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired — but a propagandist, promoted:

Promise to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless.

And don’t even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for "e-mailing" you the question. (Fox viewers, non-partisan, controlled studies have shown, are more consistently misinformed and wrong about historical events and facts than viewers who watch any other news network as their primary source. Wallace's blaming his pestering Clinton because his "viewers" asked him to is kind of like saying, "It's not my fault that a moron asked me a moronic question and I was dumb enough to ask it - it's YOUR - the answerer's fault. We distort. Then you buy."

Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen.

He told the great truth un-told… about this administration’s negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about Bin Laden.

He was brave.

Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I — in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist — and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.

The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon.

Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to 9/11." (Written by a conservative pal of Rush Dimballs).

Of that company’s crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush’s new and improved history.

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it — who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews — have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for Bin Laden in 1998 because of the Lewinsky nonsense — why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20th of that year? For mentioning Bin Laden by name as he did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The Dog." (which, of course, he'd never seen).

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri — the future Attorney General — echoed Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been "distracted" by the Lewinsky witch-hunt — who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt? Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?
Who corrupted the political media?

Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?

Who preempted them… in order to strangle us with the trivia that was… "All Monica All The Time"?
Who… distracted whom?
This is, of course, where — as is inevitable — Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are.

The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four (no, make that definitely four).

But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it’s all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.

The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton… but by the same people who got you… elected President.

Thus instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it… we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus instead of some explanation for the inertia (read: being on vacation for 40% of the time) of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us "safe" ever since — a statement that might range anywhere from Zero, to One Hundred Percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush — you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles… wrong.

Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be the textbook definition… Sir, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair — writing as George Orwell — gave us in the novel "1984."

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power…
"Power is not a means; it is an end.
"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
"The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power… is power."

Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln’s State of the Union address from 1862.

"We must disenthrall ourselves."

Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln’s sentence. He might well have.

"We must disenthrall ourselves — and then… we shall save our country."

And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date… to save… our… country.
—
The "free pass" has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush…

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done, to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us — then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture — which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding (even if torture did work, it should not be legally sanctioned by being codified; Bush would soon be torturing American citizens based upon triple and quadruple hearsay, IF they were that lucky); which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.And there it is, sir:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

I’m K.O., good night, and good luck."

PETTY THUGS

I, having read some of the choicier excerpts of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez' speeches to the U.N. earlier this week, could not help but think of (think of is too light a word - act out would be stronger) a terrific scene from the ninth Star Trek film, "Star Trek Insurrection."

I suppose I've written about this film before, but I'll try to bore everyone (emphasis on "one") this time by focusing on a branch of this movie, instead of trying to describe the forest.

The Enterprise, as the film opens, is in a region of space called "The Briar Patch," so named because this region has various stellar flotsam - toxic gases and the like - that make visibility and communication difficult. Thus, a ship can be "stuck" in it - say, if it gets smashed in a fight, as it is forced to wait that much longer for an S.O.S. comminique to be received by a sister ship out of the region.

The film opens with Data seemingly going berserk, as he starts running across the terrain of a granola-bar earthy planet inside the Briar Patch like a madroid, knocking fellow Starfleet personnel down, seemingly in relentless pursuit of.... something. Finally, Data disengages from his chase, and fires a phaser at a duckblind, revealing that Starfleet personnel, within the duckblind are watching... watching the planet's inhabitants, and studying them. Since the duckblind has now been exposed, the inhabitants (known as the Ba'ku) now are aware that the Federation has been spying on them. The fact that the spying was done for seemingly benevolent (i.e. as a prelude to "first contact") purposes does not salve the Ba'ku's displeasure over the spying.

Nor is the displeasure salved when the Ba'ku learn why the spying was conducted.... It was conducted, you see, under Federation orders, so that Starfleet could understand how the Ba'ku interacted with their environment. Starfleet needs this understanding to replicate that environment - using holodeck technology. Specifically, it wants to, in the middle of the night, beam the Ba'ku off the planet and "relocate" them to a holographic projection of that environment, hoping they will never realize they've been moved.

"Why," as Data asks, would anyone wish to deceive the Ba'ku in this fashion? It turns out that one of the first things the Starfleet scientists learned about the Ba'ku planet (which is a planet in Federation space, and thus, considered by the Federation to be its property) is that there is a high concentration of "metaphasic radiation" around the planet's rings. This radiation bathes the planet's inhabitants, continuously regenerating their cellular structure, so that once the inhabitants reach maturity, they never age. The Federation, believing it has found an elixir of youth, wants the planet all for itself - hence, the reason for why the Ba'ku are the target of a forced relocation.

Enter the So'na, another apostrophied race, one that was admitted to the Federation several years ago. The partnership was forged over a deal that both parties literally couldn't resist: the So'na, before joining, knew about the planet's magical properties, and had developed a way to harness the metaphasic radiation involving solar shield technology. Harnessing the radiation in this way - collecting it onto a ship's shields - could allow for the radiation to be brought to other planets, which would then develop into their own fountains of youth; as the Federation learned how to replicate the solar harvesting techonology, it could bring the gift of eternal life to Federation citizens across the galaxy. Of course, there's one little catch: once all of the radiation hsa been collected from planet Ba'ku, the planet will be rendered uninhabitable. Both the Federation and the So'na, guessing that the Ba'ku neither want to be forcibly leave their homeworld, nor want to have it laid waste without their knowledge, thus decided to come up with the idea of replicating the Ba'ku homeworld under stealth of night. Once such a replication was effected, the planet could then be harvested, and the fountains would spring...

The So'na, as we quickly discover, are not a nice group of people. They arm their ships with sub-space weapons (weapons whose usage was banned by a recent peace treaty); they're selfish, they're vain, they conquer other species to satisfy their vanity, and so on. Their "culture," such as it is, consists of superficial opulence. The only reason the Federation has allied itself with these people is because the former itself is crumbling, having been ravaged in recent years by war, so as to have left itself exposed as old, vulnerable and weak. But if eternal life could be brought to its citizens.....

Midway through the film, Captain Picard finds out about the arrangement the Federation has entered into with the So'na - an arrangement which is immoral, unethical, and one which - oh by the way - violates Starfleet General Order #1 - "The Prime Directive" - an order which forbids Starfleet from interfering with the evolution of a planetary society. Forcing the Ba'ku onto land that will cause them to lose their eternality certainly qualifies as violating the Prime Directive.

Starfleet's point man for the illegal operation is Admiral Daugherty. Picard, when he finds out about the arrangement, confronts Daugherty, who, oblivious to the immorality of what he is doing, prattles on about the benefits the So'na Federation arrangement will bring.

"We have the planet, they have the technology. A technology we can duplicate. You know what that makes us? Partners," Daughtery crows.

"Our partners," Picard says, with perfectly snotty intonation, "are nothing more than petty thugs."

Daugherty does not disagree with this description - indeed he embraces it. "On Earth, petroleum once turned petty thugs into world leaders."

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Only at an organization like the U.N. would two men who a) are not statesmen; b) are not politicians, even of the bottom of the barrell, scraping Duke Cunningham's sludge variety, be able to make such speeches demonizing not just the President of the United States but each and every American citizen - and receive thunderous applause for doing so.

And why - why, oh why, are these two men even given the time of day? How is it that they can afford the cost of their jackboots and tinhorns, much less afford the luxury of leading pampered lives while their "people" live in abject poverty?

It's simple. Because have petroleum, and thus are not just any petty thugs. They're petty thugs with pretensions of being world leaders. And their pretensions, sadly, are not dismissed out of hand, solely because their countries happen to be sitting upon this one resource.

We have no intention of becoming "partners" with either of them - but other countries certainly do - and such partnerships, suffice it to say, threaten not just the United States but people opposed to barbarism, not bathing, and brutality everywhere.

So, to all of the Americans who find the idea of these men even entering the General Assembly room repugnant, here's your solution: let's get serious about kicking our habit -our addiction to foreign oil. For if we do not, the petty thugs will be coming out of the woodworks - and they'll be coming not to extend our lives, but with the intent of ruining them.

TEXAS TOAST

Andrew Sullivan recently snipped about George W. Bush, "All these years later, the end-result is a Texan president who hasn't seen a civil liberty [he couldn't shred]..."

Finally, a REAL Texan (I know someone who was a Texas transplant who also was enamored of Bush "because he was from Texas"; wearing impostor perfume always seems to arouse the less discerning nostrils), one of Andrew's readers, took offense:

"If your use of the word Texan here is relevant in this context then it must be perjorative. I enjoy your column but can't help but be offended by your occasional generalizations when it comes to my state.

Please realize that all Texans do not hate civil liberties and some are even willing to fight to make sure that Texans and non-Texans alike may enjoy them. Just ask Mr. John Lawrence.

Furthermore, remember that New Haven-born Dubya was raised by a Connecticut family that spent summers vacationing in Maine. He was "educated" at the Phillips Academy (Andover, MA), followed by Yale University (New Haven, CT), followed by Harvard (Cambridge, MA). The man may have lived in Midland but the mold of the man is pure New England. Do not be fooled like the rest by the boots, bird hunts, Crawford ranch, and embellished southern accent. That's all about the politics. If you want to know about Texas and Texans then spend some time learning a bit about Ann Richards. Andrew, she was a Texan."

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Notice how George W. Bush's younger siblings - who were BORN in Texas - talk nothing like him? Walk nothing like him? The height of topsy-turvydom in this arena was reached in 2004 at the RNC Convention when Bush, in his acceptance speech, said, "And some people may be put off by the swagger with which I seem to conduct myself - a swagger which, in Texas, is called..... walking." The crowd rorared at Bush's suggestion that the entire state of Texas is one collective asshole.

Whatever a "real man" is (don't you hate when an asshole says to you, "be a man?" It's always the assholes that say that; they were assholes growing up when their mothers excused their behavior by saying "boys will be boys"; when someone refuses to wallow in their gutter, the "boys" insult the decliner's manhood, actually inviting him to... be an asshole; the asshole, once he reaches old age, thinks he is mature simply because he has lived that long - past his time of course - but he remembers John Huston's line in Chinatown about how politicians, ugly buildings, whores and monsters.... all become "respectable" if they are old enough), Bush doesn't qualify, for, among many other reasons, the fact that he genuinely believs that he needs the cowboy hat, the fake ranch, the non-existent perch catching, the flightsuit codpiece, and so on, to convince us of his manhood. To paraphrase what someone told Elaine on Seinfeld about "grace," manhood is manhood. You either have it or you don't.

BORN TOO SOON AND STARTED TOO LATE

"The anger in me!!," Mama Rose fumes in the climax of Gypsy, stalking the stage - possessing it - as if it were the last thing on the Earth and it was her own platform from which to talk to God - "If I ever let it out!" "There wouldn't be skies big enough! There wouldn't be stars bright enough!"

And later, she sings, as if from on high, to her imaginary audience: "Well, someone tell me, when is it my turn? Don't I get a dream for myself? Starting now it's gonna me my turn. Back up world get off of my runway...."

Sometimes I feel there wouldn't be enough alternate universes - to hell with stars and skies.

Surely, that's the way I felt after reading the following article in The New York Times. This article, while it is not an editorial, nicely serves all the same as a picture-perfect dissection of pretty much everything that is wrong in this country. It has such an innocuous little title, too: "Princeton stops early admission." Big deal, right?

Here it is:

Pirnceton Stops Early Admission
Michelle Conner for The New York Times

"High school seniors begin a new college application season amid growing signs that the nation’s top colleges and universities have deep misgivings about the sanity and fairness of the annual admissions frenzy.

Lloyd Thacker, a former admissions officer, said, “As educators, we would not design a system that looks like this.”

A week after Harvard abandoned early admissions as a program that puts low-income students at a disadvantage, Princeton followed suit yesterday, saying it hoped other universities would do the same. “I think it’s important for there to be momentum, because I think it’s the right decision,” said Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton’s president.

Their moves come after the presidents of Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Barnard and seven other selective liberal arts colleges, usually fierce competitors for students, also put early admissions on the table for discussion at a two-day session in June in which they voiced their profound unease about the world they helped create.

At the meeting in New York, the presidents said they spelled out their concerns over families’ paying of thousands of dollars for private college counselors, obstacles for low-income applicants and tactics some colleges use to rise in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. They spoke of efforts to drive up a college’s number of applications, so it can turn away a greater proportion of students and appear more selective, or to distribute merit aid to lure students who are top notch but not financially needy (these schools dole out merit aid in a manner that Rube Goldberg couldn't replicate, while at the same time stating "We are need-blind. Your financial circumstances should not be an obstacle toward getting an education here." Talk about contradicting yourself mid-pap!)

“It just feels ugly, the way it is now,” said one of the participants, Robert Weisbuch, the president of Drew University in Madison, N.J., while reviewing the sessions a few weeks later. “How do we remain competitive, which is a good thing in many ways, and yet at the same time try to make more rational and less fetishized this whole process for students and families?”

Patrick T. Harker, dean of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, said: “Some of the behavior that institutions engage in is quite unbelievable. There are perverse behaviors that get generated where people do things to drive the rankings.” (Wharton, of course, does this too; these people's self-denial would be funny were it not so sad. Actually, it's funny anyway. Not because it's sad. Not because if we don't laugh, we might cry. Just funny. One must simply bow to the absurd every now and then).

Some colleges and universities have already taken action. Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., said last month that its senior executives would no longer participate in an annual survey sent out by U.S. News, which asks university officials to assess other colleges.

At Amherst College, officials increased to 20 percent from 15 percent the number of working-class and low-income students in the freshman class that enrolled weeks ago (nice to know that new quotas are being developed).

The University of Delaware said in May that it would eliminate early admission. Princeton, in announcing its decision yesterday, said it agreed with Harvard that early admissions forced low-income students to commit to the university before they could compare financial aid offers from various universities. (Cornell forced me to do the same thing. Colleges, however - those walking tsamunis of whole cloth price unreality - have a very funny definition of "low income." If you can rub two quarters together, apparently you're not part of the definition).

“It’s the right decision for universities in terms of equity,” Dr. Tilghman said. “It’s the right decision for the high school students, for their parents and for their guidance counselors, who have found the two-tier system to be fraught with complexity, and that has encouraged a gaming of the system that I don’t think is good for any of us.”

Princeton’s decision will affect the class entering in 2008. In addition, each year officials from a loose association of 40 small, less well-known liberal arts colleges tour the country together, marketing their colleges as alternatives to high-pressure, high-prestige institutions. The event is known as the Colleges That Change Lives tour, after a book with that title by Loren Pope published in 1996 and revised this year.

“I’m not a believer in selectivity,” said Mr. Pope, a former private college counselor. “I think it’s phony.”
“Now everybody is obsessed with the idea of getting into a name-brand school,” he said. “The universities cannot do nearly as good a job as the colleges I like.”

The presidents of the 11 colleges represented at the New York meeting are discussing the creation of a statement of principles; the possibility of agreeing to reduce their use of early admission and merit aid, which is based on grades and test scores, not financial need; and whether they can commit to ensuring that at least 20 percent of entering freshmen are from working-class or poor households.

“Do we really need to be part of this arms race in merit aid?” said Colin Diver, the president of Reed College in Portland, Ore. “Do we need to participate in this scramble to increase the number of students to whom we say no?”

“I talk to lots of presidents who would love to disarm,” Mr. Diver said, “but they’re afraid to do it unilaterally.”

They are also considering creating a new set of statistics to measure their educational standing. The proposed standards would be available to the public, but the individual measurements would not be combined to produce an overall score, as in the ranking guides.

“There’s the data, make of it what you will,” said Douglas C. Bennett, president of Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., and another participant in the New York session, describing the ethos of the proposal.
“I dislike intensely and have been pretty sharply critical of efforts to rank institutions on a single scale,” Dr. Bennett said. (Then why haven't you made this data available already?)

Brian Kelly, the executive editor of U.S. News, said the magazine’s rankings appeared to satisfy a deep hunger from students and parents for unbiased, accurate information about colleges. “I see this as a pure exercise in consumer journalism,” Mr. Kelly said. “There is a tremendous demand for this. Fortunately, we have been able to create a model that’s sustained itself.” (Yes, a sickly symbiotic one, whatever else this vapid remark means).

“This is data that these guys collected 20 years ago and didn’t make public,” he added.

It is far from clear whether the college presidents can act in concert without being accused of collusive behavior, in violation of federal antitrust laws. Two dozen elite universities signed a consent decree in 1991, in which they promised no longer to exchange information on the amount of financial aid being offered to specific students. The Justice Department had been investigating the sharing of such information as a possible antitrust violation. (And these places have the utter nerve to be offended and shccked, Claude-Rains style, when someone lies on a college application. The fish stinks from the neck up, as they say).


Anthony W. Marx, the president of Amherst College, said he thought the group should initiate a discussion with the Justice Department about what forms of collective action might be permissible.

“Competition is important and strengthens us and can spread our net,” Mr. Marx said. “But if it’s designed to drive us in a way that’s self-serving and not in society’s interest, then that’s a problem.”

The catalyst for the New York meeting was Lloyd Thacker, a former college admissions officer and high school guidance counselor who argues that the aggressive strategies of corporate competition, including marketing, branding and image making, have compromised education.

“As educators, we would not design a system that looks like this,” Mr. Thacker said. “Colleges are businesses, yes they are, but they are businesses of a certain kind. They are public trusts.”

“We’ve sharpened our business acumen by confusing what is good for business with what is good for education,” he said.

Many of the presidents said one of their goals would be to instill in high school seniors a sense that which college they attended did not determine the course of the rest of their lives. “It’s not God’s judgment on your soul,” Dr. Weisbuch of Drew University said.

Not all of the presidents agree on what needs fixing in college admissions. Many of the most prestigious colleges do not offer merit aid (they apparently either give no aid, or consider give aid based on non-merit things that some people consider merit, or just give the money to people who don't need it; anything to keep the tracks greasedd) and some of the less selective institutions are still determined to increase their number of applicants each year, to find more good students and achieve a broader mix in their freshman classes. But many of them believe it is time to take some risks.

“If we can’t behave well,” said Thomas H. Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst, “then who can?”

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Good God, where do I begin?

IRAN (AND MANY OTHER THINGS)-CONTRA

The word "contra" means "against" in Spanish; the Nicaraguans who were fighting the Sandinista government were against that government and were thus known as "contras." Since the money used from illegal arms sales to Iran (sales also made in an attempt to procure the release of hostages; but remember - we don't negotiate with terrorists!) was funneled to the "contras," the triangle trade I have just described eventually became known as "Iran-Contra." (A silly name; but I can't come up with a better one.

The late, great Ann Richards, in 1988, adverted to then-Vice President George H.W.Bush's propensity for verbal gaffes (and for wrongdoing; his role in this scandal will never fully be known since he pardoned all of the major players right before he left office in 1992), by crowing, at the Democratic National Convention, "Poor George Bush! He was born with a silver foot in his mouth." Hysterical, and true. Indeed, last-minute revelations about Bush's role in this affair surfaced shortly before the 1992 election, helping to doom Bush's re-election bid (George's silver foot was in high dudgeon during this campaign; he called his opponents "bozos" and said "my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos.")

If George Bush's great legacy was an inability to satisfy his conservative base, George W. Bush's great legacy is his failure to satisfy anything but what is now defined as "the conservative base."

Andrew Sullivan writes of the phenonmenon beginning to sweep the GOP - that of key legislators openly defying Bush on his "signature" (signing statements?) issues of Iran, terra, Iraq, terra, and... terra:


Powell leads the right in a Bush-whack
Andrew Sullivan


In my first year in America, as a budding young conservative, my old friend, the writer John O’Sullivan, invited me out to dinner. The dinner, it turned out, was with none other than William F Buckley, a man who remains the undisputed titan of American conservatism.

Buckley became famous in America in the 1950s and 1960s for being a conservative intellectual when such a thing was regarded as axiomatically oxymoronic. He founded the National Review, the indispensable magazine for the burgeoning American conservative movement.

He was one of the inspirations for Barry Goldwater’s emergence as a conservative Republican nominee in 1964, and instrumental in Ronald Reagan’s long, steady intellectual (Andrew, please!) march to power. I wasn’t having dinner with just anyone that night — but with a man for whom the phrase eminence grise seemed to have been invented.

I recall this because if Buckley has decided George W Bush is not a conservative, it cannot be easily dismissed. Some of us were so appalled by Bush’s profligate spending, abuse of power and recklessness in warfare that we reluctantly backed John Kerry in 2004 as the more authentically conservative candidate. Many Republicans scoffed. Now fewer do.

“I think Mr Bush faces a singular problem, best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology,” Buckley recently explained. “[The president] ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress. And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge . . . There will be no legacy for Mr Bush. I don’t believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.”

His legacy, I’d argue, is actually quite decipherable. It includes two bungled wars, a doubling of the national debt, a ruination of America’s moral high ground in the war against Islamist terror, the worst US intelligence fiasco since the Bay of Pigs, and the emergence of Iran as a regional and potentially nuclear power with control of the West’s energy supplies.

But the damage to America itself — to its cultural balance and constitutional order — is just as profound. In a recent CNN story on Southern women and the Republicans, one voter explained: “There are some people, and I’m one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord. I don’t care how he governs, I will support him. I’m a Republican through and through.”

American conservatism has gone from being a political philosophy rooted in scepticism of power, empirical judgment and limited government into an ideology based in born-again religious faith, immune to empirical reality and dedicated to the relentless expansion of presidential clout. It sanctions wiretapping without court warrants, indefinite detention without trial and the use of torture.

Last week saw perhaps the tipping point in the reawakening of the traditional conservative perspective. In the Senate, the president’s bid to legalise torture and ad hoc military tribunals was stopped not by the Democrats but by four key Republican senators: John McCain of Arizona, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2008, John Warner of Virginia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.

They were supported by the former secretary of state, Colin Powell, who penned a public letter to McCain opposing Bush’s detention policies. “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell observed. “To redefine common article 3 [of the Geneva convention] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”

It is hard to dismiss McCain and Powell as men who do not know a thing about war or torture. One was tortured by the Vietcong; another actually won a war in Iraq. The contrast with the current White House is almost painful to observe.

Two weeks ago, word leaked that the president’s political guru, Karl Rove, was hoping to use the issue of who was tough enough on military prisoners against the Democrats in the November congressional elections. He was going to tar them as wimps again for not waterboarding terror suspects. But that strategy was stopped in its tracks by Senator Graham.

“This is not about November 2006. It is not about your election,” Graham declared with passion. “It is about those who take risks to defend America.”

Graham is also a former military lawyer and, along with the entire legal leadership in the US military, opposes Bush’s military kangaroo courts. “It would be unacceptable legally in my opinion to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” he said of the White House proposal. “‘Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.” It’s also, well, not American.

To add to the revolt, last week six leading conservative writers penned separate essays on why the Republicans deserve to lose the November congressional elections. Here’s a stunning quote from one of them: “The United States has seen political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The constitution itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow for ‘deliberate sense’ and checks and balances.

“President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favour of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau.”

That passage was written by Jeffrey Hart, a speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan and another pillar of the conservative movement. It’s a sign of a brewing conservative revolt against Bush’s policies that may crest at November’s elections.

Bush has allies in the House of Representatives — but what appears to be a unified and stalwart resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate. It turns out that the US does have a functioning opposition party after all. It’s called the authentically conservative wing of the Republicans."

Sadly, the abominations this President has visited upon us do not matter to some people, because Bush, in their view, "supports Israel." Apparently, all manner of disgusting things this President has done is forgiven, because he incidentally likes, or gives the impression of liking, for fanatical reasons, another country that is engaged in a much more real struggle for freedom from terrorism. Of course, more Israelis have died as a result of suicide bombings and the like since Bush was President than when Clinton was, but this does not matter to certain Jews in America. If Bush leaves a legacy that sufficiently compels someone (as it has compelled many) to come to the conclusion that America has been irreversibly weakened and tainted as a nation, then Israel may appear to be a more attractive place to live to some of these people. Supporting Israel by making people here lament that the gap in the quality of life between the two nations is declining is not "support" - and it's a pity that some people's desire to be part of the "in-crowd" is so strong that they allow themselves to enthusiastically abandon their minds.

THE TALE OF THE TAPE

Wow. On the heels of last (partly perfect) weekend, what do I find, a week later, at the end of a weekend highlighted by its utter sullen indistinctness? A perfect television moment (a perfect movie moment, actually). Two "perfects" in two weeks. No, my standards haven't lowered - but perhaps someone is watching over me.

There have been a few perfect movie moments. These moments, consisting of lines or scenes that are much like Yiddish words in their ability to succintly describe a complicated comcept. The moments also manage to have impeccable (usually comic; the few perfect scenes I've seen are from comedies) timing, and relay the filmmaker's beliefs, sense of naughtiness, the thoughts of a character, and so on, in such a funny way - a way that at first can seem alien but one which we realize is perfect once we realize the point of the line or the scene - that the lines or scenes are much like Shakespeare's words: nothing can ever substitute for reading them the first time. a

A few sample movie lines: "Don't flinch while I'm talking to you, you speed-trap sheigits!" - State and Main
"I'll be the victim." "All your life." - Addams Family Values
And, a true classic, the "your problem is that you're beautiful" speech Jack Nicholson gave to Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf.

A few sample TV lines:

"Get your finger out of there" - Krusty the Klown wind-up doll
"That's easy to say - you don't have a hand up your toches!" - Gabbo
"Please rise for the national anthem" - Futurama (actually, the line plus the first few seconds of the national anthem is what makes this one one for the pantheon).

I just was watching "Fever Pitch." The film came out shortly after - yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause - the Red Sox, down 3 games to 0, won the next 4 games, in 2004, to defeat the Yankees and win the AL Pennant (the Sox then went on to sweep St. Louis and win the World Series, ending the "Curse of the Bambino.") The movie was filmed as the 2004 season unfolded, so we see the characters - die-hard Red Sox fans - going through the emotional ups and downs that come with being a Red Sox fan - in a way that seems less like an artifice and more like something approaching movie reality.

Jimmy Fallon - the male lead, and a die-hard Sox fan - is, at one point, once he realizes the Red Sox, at best, will win the wild card, is, in one scene, in quite a funk. He's somewhat drunk, and is incredibly depressed, pissy, out of it, and inconsolable - not in the way real people are, mind you, but I digress.

We see him, at the height of this fit of misery, place a tape into the VCR. What's on the tape? Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. More specifically - yes, you've got it - the Bill Buckner play. The character watches the play several times. A few friends burst in. They realize that his watching the tape is evidence that he's really in a funk. One friend demands, "Who gave you this tape?" Another, repulsed by what he sees on screen, snaps, "Don't tell me you have more copies!" Then another chimes in: "Your apartment is now contaminated." The Fallon character's response: "Stanley wasn't covering first base!"

Either you get it or you don't, I guess - but if you're as familiar with this particular game as I am (and if you're a Mets fan), then when you watch this scene, you'll be watching a perfect moment showing a perfect moment. How much more perfect can you get?

IN A WORLD GONE MAD, THE ONLY SANE....

As George Bush took the oath of office in January of 2001 (I did not watch the event; I was speaking to my father on television, who was watching it on Fox News - he likes watching Fox News, because people scream and shout at each other on that channel), the queasiness generated by the implication of a fact had now fully set in: all three branches of the federal government were to be Republican-controlled for the foreseeable future. Republicans, prior to the 2000 election, had already had a majority in the House; Democrats, as of the swearing-in date, had lost their several-months majority in the Senate; a Republican (whom I knew during the campaign was a "conservative" psycho dressed in "moderate clothing," as should anyone with half a brain) would now be President; and the Supreme Court, fresh from having issued a decision it KNEW to be not in accordance with constitutional jurisprudence, was also Republican.

So, as my father and I were on the phone, he made a remark to me that he had made several times in the past. The remark needed no explanation to me, but I'm afraid it might to a select few group of people I've been talking to lately. "I'd better make sure my passport is still good," he said. "I hope to God you're joking," I replied.

My father is an Israeli (he was born in Hadera, a favorite terrorist target), and as such, as dual citizenship and can return to Israel at any time. His remark meant two different things, but both of the things expressed a common sentiment. The first thing it meant was: 1)I am an immigrant, and therefore I had better make sure I can still get out of this country, and having a valid passport is the only way I can do that (he said this, of course, because of Republicans' dutifully xenophobic anti-immigrant stance, a stance whiich has been cultivated over the last 100 years, and which is still very much in evidence - see, e.g., the House of Representative's current posturing over the President's immigration bill, Pat Buchanan et al's absurd "reconquista" notion, and so forth). The second thing it meant was 2) I am Jewish - and as such, I am a member of a minority that is simply not embraced by the Bush crew - as Bush has already made it clear during his campaign that he intends to cater to an evangelical Protestant base. Therefore, I hope the "right of return" is still good.

About the subject of Bush, Jews, and Israel, I feel, as Paddy Chayefsky (ironically) once said, that I must say something, at least "if I expect to live with myself in the morning." Bush does not care about Jewish people. His base includes large Christian demonimations who vilify Jews on a regular basis, who make comments such as "God does not listen to the prayers of a Jew," who took the occassion of "The Passion of the Christ" as an opportunity to remind the whole world that Jews were "Christ-killers"; who constantly criticize "Hollywood" and the "Northeastern liberal media" (read: in their minds, "Jewish" people). The first public prayer session, held by Bush as part of his inaugural, was one at which only Evangelical Protestants were welcome. In contrast, Clinton's equivalent session was one at which a rabbi, a Catholic Priest, and a reverend, were all welcome.

But, say some, what about Bush's "Office of Faith-Based Initiatives?" Isn't the very existence of this office proof that he cares about Orthodox Jews? No. The only people ever appointed to this office have been evangelical Christians interested in using that office as a profit-making enterprise. Not a single Jewish - or even Catholic - person, for that matter, has ever been appointed to this office.

But, say some, what about Bush's "School choice" initiative? Isn't THAT proof that he cares about Jewish interests? Again, no. The sectarian schools he has offered up as model schools under this program have, again, been overwhelmingly Protestant. The "school choice" program is born out of a conservative desire to destroy public schools, not out of a desire to show concern for the religious interests of people of all faiths.

But, some still say, what about Bush's hatred of Muslims? Surely THAT proves the Jews are on his side... No, it doesn't either. His pollsters have told him (justifiably so, to a large degree) that fanning the flames of Muslim hatred is good politics. Yet this tactic has mostly stoked... You guessed it, the onward-Christian soldiers cabal that has hijacked out military, and that has shoved various branches of the Armed Forces to be subject to proselytyzaion, hearing Christian prayers, and so on. Yes, if I were Jewish, I would certainly feel welcome having been subject to these activities.

But, but, what about Bush's massive tax cuts geared toward the rich? Surely THIS is evidence of solicitousness toward Jews, many of whom are wealthy. Again, no. The massive tax cuts reach such Bush favorites as... Bill Clinton and black people, for crying out loud. Their enactment is not evidence of pro-Jewish sentiment.

The Republican party is still a white Christian party (80+ percent of its members are white Christians). As the old saying in politics goes, "you dance with those who brung you." Did Bush condemn Pat Robertson's comment about Ariel Sharon's "deserving" his stroke? Did he condemn Jerry Falwell's comment about a Jew being the Antichrist? No, and no.

Bush himself comes from a family that engaged in war profiteering with the Nazis. He had a Jewish girlfriend (don't ask me how that happened), but his mother made sure the relationship never got any further than that. Jews are among the most educated minorities in the world, and 80% of us voted against Bush in the last election.

Yet there are 20% of us (count me not among them) who insist that the other 80% have "got it all wrong." These 20% say that Bush is a friend of Israel, and thus, automatically, a friend of the Jews. For the life of me, if I could physically disprove the canard that being a friend of Israel means being a friend of the Jews, I would until these 20% were mentally beaten into submission.

Bush believes in the oldly-minted but newly-applauded concept of "The Rapture." If you do not believe this - if his own public statements do not serve as sufficient evidence of this, read Gore Vidal's book, "Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia." Vidal reports fact when it comes to explicating Bush's belief in this matter. Under the Rapture, 4/5 of all Jews are to be killed BEFORE JESUS EVEN COMES BACK to Earth; the remaining 1/5 are either to be forcibly converted to Christianity or die once Jesus appears. My God - feel the friendship!!!

Bush's evangelical Protestant backers believe in the concept of the Rapture as well - in other words - they believe in the mass extermination of the Jews (yes, they like us that much), but, according to scripture, one of several things must happen before the Rapture can occur: Israel must be controlled by the Jews. Last time I checked, it is. Of course, many Raptureologists have interpreted the phrase "to be controlled by Jews" to mean that the land that makes up Israel cannot be encroached upon by those who would do Israel harm; hence, Bush's non-reaction to the recent Israel-Lebanon-Hamas contest, and his utter unwillingness to engage in peace talks. After all, peace talks may lead to a geographical reconstitution of Israel, which some Raptureologists claim will result in the precondition not being fulfilled (never mind that God did not specify the exact latitudinal and longitudal coordinates of Israel). Also, peace talks may lead to.... peace talks, which means non-war, a concept which is begging to meet this administration's acquaintance.

To answer the question of whether Bush's support of Israel means support of the Jews, we must first ask why he supports Israel. I indicated reason #1 above. Reason #2 is, of course, the fact that Israel is the only democratic country in the region, and as such, can keep a watchful eye on the barbarian (oil-producing) Muslim countries who may decide to get out of line. I still fail to see, however, how either reason is indicative of suppport for Jews as such. After all, what does Bush know of Jewish culture, tradition, and so on. He thinks the Jews killed Christ. Do you REALLY believe someone like this wants to cozy up to us? And by the way, that he has nominated a fair number of people into Defense Department positions that are Jewish does not change the fact that his actions toward Israel are not reflective of pro-Jewish sentiment. The people in question happen to support Bush's version of "transforming" (read: capturing the oil of) the Middle East. These people, understandably, would love to bomb Muslim nations, as would Bush, simply because his pollsters told him that in the wake of Sept. 11th, it would make him look strong (do you really think Bush has his own opinion on these immensely complicated matters?)

So, Bush's support of Israel - while it is not necessarily indicative of anti-Jewish ANIMUS, definitely does not mean support of Jews. Some people will never understand this, though. Why?

Norman Podhoretz, the intellectual grandfather of the neoconservative movement, in explaining why Jews should sign on to Bush-like "pro-Israel" agendas, said: "Israel (which in his mind is tantamount to "the Jews" does not have the luxury of picking its friends. Therefore, it must take its friends how and where it finds them,") as if Israel were a tortfeasor and its victim an eggshell skull Plaintiff. Podhoretz' statement presumes pro-Israel=Pro Jewish, DESPITE evidence to the contrary (or else he would not have made the "eggshell skull" comment). Why should I have to agree with his "logic" such that if I don't, I am a self-hating Jew/do not care about Israel/do not care about the Jews? Many Jewish people say that if I don't agree with his logic, I AM a self-hating Jew/don't care about Israel/about the Jews. To them, I say, for lack of a better phrase, fuck you. It is tempting beyond tempting for the most vilified minority in history to embrace a group/President who exhibits a trait (i.e. support for the nation of Israel) that the vilified minority approves of. Why? Because a vilified minority has not known friends for so long that it will literally drink the sand. I can speak to this point from my own personal experiecence. I have no friends where I live. I would be willing to put up with, for the sake of having a friend, a lot of imperfections. But that doesn't mean that the friend is someone who should be embraced head-over-heels, or that the friend necessarily really "likes you." The friend, more probably, simply hates the idea of being ALONE more, just as Bush hates the idea of the U.S. being the only democracy who votes against the interests of the savages, and thus, out of this hatred (and among other reasons), supports Israel so that he can have at least one other nation stand with him at the U.N. This Hatred, though, is neither tanamount to, nor does it imply, that Bush actually LIKES individual Israelis (read: Jews), and yet the need for American Jews to be accepted by their government is so strong that they have deluded themselves into thinkin it does. Read Alan Dershowitz' "The Vanishing American Jew" for a description of this phenomenon. Dershowitz is defiantly pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, but he is able to understand that one does not imply the other, and has convincingly - if not conclusively - demonstrated how history has shown that one does not imply the other.

So, despite the fact that (as Bill Maher pointed out a few weeks ago) Bush's support for Israel has nothing to do with support of Jewish people, should I nonetheless vote Republican? No, because let's not forget something: the support of Israel by the U.S. only goes so far. Because we give Israel aid, and because our shit doesn't stink, we feel we have the right to tell Israel who it can and cannot attack (e.g., 1982, and so on). Were Israel to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran, the Bush government would,in some way, denounce this action, because it did not control the sequence of events. A curious response for a government that claims to support Israel so whoeheartedly. I should also not vote Republican because for the TIME BEING, Israel is hated less than the Muslims are. Republicans play hate games like they play musical chairs. Saudi Arabia is our ally. If several Muslim countries dangled some kind of oil-laden carrot in front of us, who KNOWS were Israel's standing vis a vis these other nations would be. And there is, yes, one more reason why I should not vote Republican just because of the support for Israel: by voting republican, I may very well be voting myself into having to exercise the right of return (which applies to children of sabras). Perhaps, indeed, this is one reason why Republicans support Israel: so that if tweaks need to be made to immigration policy, Jews living in America that were born in Israel will be welcomed back there due to our "generosity" toward Israel over the years.
And, finally, I am not a single-issues voter. Over the last six years, real wages have stagnated, the costs of health care have skyrocketed, our civil rights have been ass-raped, mouth-raped and vaginal-raped, the environment has been ravaged and ravished, all thanks to Bush and friends. Sorry, but I have a right to say that these issues, collectively, are at least as important to me as Bush's support for Israel, a nation which learned long ago that it must (and indeed can) defend itself alone. If the United States continues upon the regressive path it is now marching down, and thus moving to -say - Israel - is thus required, then HOW on EARTH can Bush be said to be a friend of Israel? A friend does not typically force the other friend to take the first friend's possessions while giving nothing in return. If I forced a friend to provide room and board for my entire family because I couldn't stand the family, and because I had driven the family to the point of eviction/to the point where they couldn't stand me because I ruled over the family with an iron fist, is the friend who takes the family in going to view my forcing the family upon it as an act of friendship? What kind of collective madness has afflicted us?

Oh, and one more thing: the pro-Israel=pro-Jewish crows takes it as an article of faith that a Republican President is somehow a better protector of Jewish interests than is a Democratic one. I guess that means the 80% of a highly educated sub-population is a perenial group of morons, and that their caring about civil rights and for fellow Jews in particular (as opposed to the vague notion of "the State of Israel") means nothinb. Since, however, one has no idea what Republicans' ACTUAL motivations are for supporting Israel, how can we be sure they will better protect Jewish interests? It's like believing someone who says, "Well, my religion hates you because of reasons x, y and z. Reason x may REALLY cause me to hate you, even exterminate you, in the next four years. But in the meantime, we'll be sympathetic toward the State of Israel-maybe." Would you trust this person? I wouldn't. For the people who keep wanting Jews, Palestinians and other people to die, voting Republican makes a lot of sense - because this is what happens whenever a Republican is president - the number of suicide bombings and Jewish civilian casaulties goes up, as compared to when a Democrat is president. When a Democrat is President, yes, I concede that the Democrat may not be as "pro-Israel," in that the Democrat may actually attempt to be interested in peace talks, and may criticize Israel for its actions, but living under a Democrat, I do not fear that my rights as an American Jew are imperiled, and thus I don't feel the COMPULSION to relocate to Israel. And since EVERY U.S. President has been pro-Israel to one degree or another (the Democrats, out of practicality, I think; the Republicans, for God knows what reason), I still think I'll vote Democratic, despite the perception that Republicans are more "pro-Israel." If that stance means that I am an unwelcome citizen here, then the stance is of little comfort to me. Many Democrats have made regrettable anti-Israel comments over the last few years; thus, however, can be accounted for as much by their hatred of Bush as for any other reason. If a Democrat DOES get elected President, that person by DEFINITION will be "pro-Israel," because the country would not permit him or her to be otherwise. And if I had to say whose anti-SEMITIC (not anti-Israel) comments I found more scary - Jesse Jackson's or Pat Robertson's - I'd choose the latter, because Robertson and his ilk have tremendous sway over White House policy, whereas Jesse Jackson does not and never will. Sometimes, yes, it comes down to whether the insulter can actually be in a position to turn his insults into policy. The religious right can; Jackson can't. Michael Moore can't set policy, but James Dobson can.

Earlier this year, Hesh's daughter on the Sopranos passed a comment: "We should be friends with the conservative Christians. They support the Jews because they support Israel." Hesh, who was older and wiser than his daughter, simply chuckled, and told his daughter, "You wait."

The "you waiters" in America: stand proud and be counted!

FRESH FROM THE FIGHT

I just had to use that title, which is part of a song from "Footloose." The song, I discovered about two weeks ago (after I heard it on - what else? - the opening five minutes of "Cold Case') iis "Holding Out for a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler. (Leave it to that show to get the tiniest details right; the opening five minutes depict a man in a hospital literally being shocked back to life in a hospital by a doctor as this song whirs in the background amidst the shouting of the man's family, the clanging of the ER machinery, and so on).

Remember what other movie used this song? A fairly recent movie - and in a very funny way. The song was performed by someone who wanted to be the center of attention at an elaborately staged deception - a deception that she almost pulled off. The "she," if you haven't figured out yet, was "Fairy Godmother," and the movie was Shrek 2, and the manner in which FG performed the song was flat-out hysterical - the song was an utterly inappropriate choice for the occassion, and was sang as perfectly inappropriately as it was supposed to have been sang.

I've read the utterly dopey lyrics to this song, which, I guess, is an act that makes me gay, and these lyrics are really dopey. We don't even learn what "the fight is" by the end of the song, so it goes without saying we cannot figure out how one becomes fresh from it. But something occurred to me - both as I read the lyrics, as I saw Shrek 2, and even as I saw the opening several minutes of "Cold Case": the song is mindless good fun, so who cares? We can always imagine what the lyric means - "just be ready for another day where anything can happen" - and just go from there.

This past weekend, I visited Universal Studios in Orlando. The last time I was in Orlando solely to do tourist stuff was (and still is) 1987. Then, Universal hadn't even been built. When I visited the park this Sunday, the lines were pretty short, and I got to experience the "Shrek" exhibit, along with many others. The day was just a blast. I haven't been to an amusement park (other than my body, har har) in a long time. I have NEVER gone to one with JUST friends, let alone two friends that, when placed together, caused me to laugh more in one day than I have all year(note that this is not because both are intentionally funny; one tells very funny jokes and the other does things that allows the other to do same), and have NEVER been able to cover so much of an American theme park -let alone one I've been wanting to visit for so long - in one day - a day with perfect weather, in which I was feeling fine, and a day that was just about the perfect antidote to a previous week where my work life had turned upside down.

It's odd to consider how a perfect day - and this day, from about 10-3 was perfect not in the sense that each moment was perfect but in the sense that the day was so terrific that I simply managed just about to abandon everything that was worrying me and to just BE -can even be in a position to come about. Millions of decisions - unintentional, intentional, lucky, bizarre, and god knows what else, go into it. For example, if I hadn't gone to law school where I did, this day would not have happened. The only reason I went to law school where I did was because one night it dawned on me that law schools only cared about one test score, and that I had better apply to as many as possible up and down the East Coast to get into a good one. If I hadn't signed up for certain classes, I would never have met the friends I mentioned, and if I hadn't casually made a remark to one of the friends over the phone when I heard him over the phone reading something aloud, an act which led me to lend this person some help in the writing department..... And, if, after July of 2003, I hadn't survived a fight I didn't even know I had started - a fight against myself and others - and did not - quite improbably - somehow remain "fresh" from it until this day (and knock on wood, hopefully forever more), there woulld have been no perfect day.