RUBBER STAMPS

We'll see whether the Banana Republicans will be turned out of office -- dumped, I hope, like the old rubber stamps they are -- or whether they will retain their power as enablers of the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his minions.

David Brooks, in his latest inanity, writes: "You do not want your opponent running ads calling you a rubber stamp, because in this climate that hurts." Which is to say, in some it doesn't? (Was he was thinking of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan?)

Not to single him out -- although he also deserves it for his previous inanity (bemoaning the expected defeat of Rick Santorum) -- Peggy Noonan ought to be cited as well. She, too, sees the defeat of that Banana Republican as "a national loss."

In her Wall Street Journal column on Saturday, headlined "We Need His Kind," she writes that she asked a former senator ("a crusty old moderate Republican") if he liked Santorum. "No," he said, "I love him." Why? Because, when the old crust tried to mentor him,

Mr. Santorum was grateful and appreciative, "but he kept speaking his mind!" The former senator: "The political scientists all say to be honest and stand for principle, that's what people want. And he was exactly that, and he's about to get his head handed to him." ... It was sad, he said.

So Noonan wants us to believe Santorum will get his head handed to him not for being a rubber stamp -- a 98% voting record with the bullshitter, according to his opponent -- but for being honest? Now that's a laugh.

November 5, 2006 10:41 AM |

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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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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on November 5, 2006 10:41 AM.

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