CHOICE CUTS

We called him the Pick with an 'R'. Doug Ireland calls him Alito the Hun. "[I]t’s hard to imagine a more reactionary judge," Brother Doug writes. He begins his dissection with a couple of choice cuts:

Theocratic pit bull Gary Bauer, the dwarf former presidential candidate of the Christer hard right, crowed that the appointment of Alito was "a grand slam," and crackpot antediluvian Phyllis Schlafly -- who called Bush’s corporate flunky Harriet Miers a dangerous "feminist," of all things -- likewise gave her enthusiastic blessing ...

More from Brother Doug's terrible swift scalpel: The Hun "would gut Roe v. Wade," if given the chance, and he's homophobic -- see his decision "in a case involving a disabled kid who was repeatedly a target of nasty anti-gay epithets." He "doesn’t have much use for the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures," either. So "you can kiss a lot of your rights and liberties goodbye -- permanently" if "Holy Joe" Lieberman and other right-wing Senate Dems "vote to short-circuit any filibuster" of the nomination.

Trouble is, unless we miss our guess, the Pick with an 'R' is too damned mainstream to rate a filibuster. Forgive us, lawd, our jaundiced view.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: In re: Iraqi Official Aims to Refurbish Image:

TOP OF THE SAND HEAP

Let bygones be bygones and let's not be snobby
In welcoming back Mr. Ahmad Chalabi.
So he led us astray quite memorably
With fanciful tales of WMD,
So what if he gave the U.S. a black eye
By serving as a double or triple spy.
On this range there's no chance of a perfect rider
Especially when he's a D.C. insider.
He's now the Iraqi deputy prime minister
And apt very soon to be something more sinister:
The actual prime minister, the top of the summit,
A position from which he's unlikely to plummet,
For he's coming to confab with Ms. Condi Rice,
Whom he bamboozled once -- so, pray, why not twice?

-- Leon Freilich

November 2, 2005 9:13 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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