About you know what. Like everybody else, we’ve done our Sunday reading: Brian Calame, the public editor of The New York Times, weighs in with “The Miller Mess: Lingering Issues Among the Answers.” Richard W. Stevenson and Douglas Jehl report on the front page: “Leak Case Renews Questions on War’s Rationale.” (Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser to Bush Daddy, will be weighing in tomorrow in The New Yorker, they tell us.) And Frank Rich unloads on “Karl and Scooter’s Excellent Adventure.”
But we want to call your attention to David Brooks on “The Savior of the Right.” He writes that the Bullshitter-in-Chief has “modernized and saved” conservatism. We were still rubbing our eyes over that, when along came the reiteration: “Despite all the mistakes that have been made, it is nonetheless true that [he] has ennobled and saved American conservatism.”
Also, how about this for inflation? In her review of “Veronica,” Mary Gaitskill’s new novel, Meghan O’Rourke sails in turgid waters when she writes:
Her prose has a perfumed clarity. She tacks against the upright dichotomies of our historical moment — dichotomies that shape how we think and who we are but are often more contingent than we know.
We’ll overlook the “perfumed clarity,” though we shouldn’t, but we can’t help asking: Will somebody please tack O’Rourke’s dichotomies to the wall for us? Does anybody know what she’s talking about? Does she?
— Tireless Staff of Thousands
