01 March 2010

All Presidential Politics is Local


How about a quotation from almost my favourite scribbler in all the world, Dr. Bones?


Eight hundred words is only eight hundred words, so naturally Master Ross [Douthat] had to leave somethin’ out. Probably a whole gaggle of not insignificant somethin’s.

The barkless dog this Democrat noticed most is that it did not cross the mind of the publicist to wonder whether the success --let us stipulate the success--of Neocomrade Governor M. E. Daniels, Jr., in Indiana might have to do with the peculiarities of Indiana as well as of the Party hero himself.

In the United Kingdom there was once a rightist-to-reactionary politician of whom it was said, after he was established as Prime Minister, that he made "a good lord mayor of Birmingham in a lean year." And every schoolboy remembers Dr. Harvey's little zinger about Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who "wrote philosophy well for a Lord Chancellor." I.e., a candidate's C.V. ought to jibe with the real-world requirements of the position that she seeks in deed, and not in word alone.

Whether any of our G.O.P. geniuses consciously reflect that "After all, the USA is only Indiana writ large," I have no idea. It would account for a couple of strikin’ characteristics of that neocrew, however, to attribute some such notion to them.[*] And they could act like that even without ever consciously thinkin’ ’bout it.

Healthy days.

___
[*] As a perfunctory gesture at the so-called ‘bipartisanship’: it goes quite a long analytical distance towards explaining the unhappinesses of Mr. Clinton's administration, I’d say, that Arkansas does not "look like America" much more than Indiana does. (Of Alaska, we need not speak!)






Play that again, Sam, only the other way, please.



Eight hundred words is only eight hundred words, so naturally Master Ross [Douthat] had to leave somethin’ out. Probably a whole gaggle of not insignificant somethin’s.

The barkless dog this Democrat noticed most is that it did not cross the mind of the publicist to wonder whether the success --let us stipulate the success--of Neocomrade Governor M. E. Daniels, Jr., in Indiana might have to do with the peculiarities of Indiana as well as of the Party hero himself.

In the United Kingdom there was once a rightist-to-reactionary politician of whom it was said, after he was established as Prime Minister, that he made "a good lord mayor of Birmingham in a lean year." And every schoolboy remembers Dr. Harvey's little zinger about Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who "wrote philosophy well for a Lord Chancellor." I.e., a candidate's C.V. ought to jibe with the real-world requirements of the position that she seeks in deed, and not in word alone.

Whether any of our G.O.P. geniuses consciously reflect that "After all, the USA is only Indiana writ large," I have no idea. It would account for a couple of strikin’ characteristics of that neocrew, however, to attribute some such notion to them.[*] And they could act like that even without ever consciously thinkin’ ’bout it.

Healthy days.

___
[*] As a perfunctory gesture at the so-called ‘bipartisanship’: it goes quite a long analytical distance towards explaining the unhappinesses of Mr. Clinton's administration, I’d say, that Arkansas does not "look like America" much more than Indiana does. (Of Alaska, we need not speak!)





HTML being far more interesting and important than anythin’ whatever scribbled in the Party Chinese of Señorito Douthát y Podhóretz, I think the big issue here is whether to fix up the template so BLOCKQUOTE does not imply double spacing and everything in italics, or just forget about it altogether. The drawback of the latter plan is that when not chez soi, BLOCKQUOTE is all that exists: I have yet to find anybody else's peanut gallery where the TABLE\TD gizmo works intelligibly, let alone right. What do thee think, sir?

Happy days.





No comments: