WHAT LANGUAGE ARE WE SPEAKING?

Apparently a different one from Donald ("You bet!") Rumsfeld, whose command of verbal tactics challenges the basic meaning of words. For instance, when asked Tuesday whether the Pentagon was considering the deployment of more troops to Iraq, he replied: "Are we considering it? No. But have we prepared? You bet."

It would take the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to parse the difference, and even they couldn't do it. Not when Rumsfeld also said that in case the top U.S. military commander in Iraq wants more troops "we've made arrangements to have them replaced" and "were [he] to require still additional forces, we have thought through that as well."

Get it? Mr. You Bet is not considering additional troop deployments. He's merely made arrangements and thought them through. God help us if we ever get used to his equivocations. Unless our "hopes and dreams" are no longer owned by him, or Mr. Waffles, or Crony in Chief Cheney, or anyone else in the little fucker's administration, we're headed for worse troubles than troop deployments in Iraq.

Which reminds me. Have you heard of the NO-CARB Diet for 2004?

NO C-heney
NO A-shcroft
NO R-umsfeld
NO B-ush

Oh, and absolutely NO RICE. This diet should take you through Janurary 2005.

April 21, 2004 9:10 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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