She’s No Girly-Man
Republicans are meaner than Democrats, many observers believe.
Syndicated pundette Susan Estrich believes it, anyway. That’s how “the arrogant little Republican boys who [were] strutting around New York” last week have managed to turn this year’s presidential race around, Estrich explains in her September 1 column: Bush’s minions have secretly contrived an elaborate “smear campaign” of “lies and half-truths” against a good and noble man, Sen. John Kerry. And Sen. Kerry, being a good and noble man, has turned the other cheek, declining to respond in kind. Nice guys finish last, as it were.
So the nicer guys might nevertheless–just this once–retain at least a fighting chance until the final bell, Ms. Estrich urges independent Democratic organizations immediately to begin spending millions of dollars on nationally broadcast television ads designed to alert the country to the true character of its current political leadership. For instance:
* President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Estrich offers, have “managed to rack up” something like “three, or is it four or five, drunken driving arrests” between them, a record suggesting that both men have “a serious problem with alcoholism.”
* Estrich continues: “Is any alcoholic ever cured?” Put another way: “Has America really faced the fact that we have an alcoholic as our president?” And are we really comfortable that such a man has “control of weapons capable of destroying the world at his fingertips”?
* Also, think of “those who served in Vietnam instead of the privileged draft-dodging president, and ended up as names on the wall instead of members of the Air National Guard.” Imagine an ad featuring their still-grieving mothers! “It wouldn’t be so hard to find them.”
THE SCRAPBOOK notes that the above-quoted essay comes complete with a little note attached to the bottom by the column’s distributor, Creators Syndicate. Please visit our website, the company recommends, if you want “to find out more about Susan Estrich.”
No thanks.
Delegates Call Moore “Fat Pig”
Yes, that’s right, reports the Associated Press: Michael Moore, “who attended [last] week’s Republican National Convention as a columnist for USA Today, was greeted by delegates who derided him as a ‘fat pig.'”
See, see? What did Susan Estrich tell you: Republicans are mean. Moreover, further confirming the Estrich view of things, experts consulted by AP reporter Jerry Schwartz worry that here, too, GOP mudslingers might prove not just mean, but effective. What if Michael Moore’s feelings get hurt, by golly?
“They’re thinking this is going to hurt him more, this is going to hurt him as a person,” agrees Sandy Schaffer, New York chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.
Filmmaker Moore, for his part, “says he once was skinny, but put on weight in the 1980s when he lived on $99 a week in unemployment and subsisted on cheap, starchy foods.”
Ronald Reagan was unavailable for comment.
Neurological Activity from Johnny Apple
This just in: R.W. “Johnny” Apple Jr. of the New York Times reports that people he knows–you know: the best sorts of people–really don’t like George W. Bush very much. Who’da thunk it? From the September 1 “Apple’s Almanac,” a spectacularly fatuous piece of self-parody that Johnny’s editors at the Times naturally decided to run every day during last week’s Republican convention:
Confidential SCRAPBOOK memo to Karl Rove: The “Hey, I know, let’s go to Switzerland this week” vote? It’s gone. Fuhgeddaboudit.
An Important Correction from the New York Times
“A front-page column in [the Arts & Leisure] section on July 4 about the marketing of Bill Clinton’s memoir ‘My Life’ quoted erroneously from a comment he made in 1998 about Monica Lewinsky. He said he ‘did not have sexual relations with that woman’–not ‘never had sexual relations with that woman.’ The Times was notified of the error on July 5; this correction was delayed by an editing lapse.”
–Editors’ note,
New York Times, August 29
So’s My Mudda
Looks like somebody needs to update that famous New Yorker cartoon by Saul Steinberg, the one with a map of the world in which Manhattan looms enormously large in the foreground while everything farther afield than Hoboken, New Jersey, is reduced to the size of a pea. Steinberg was gently spoofing his fellow New Yorkers’ characteristic blend of titanic self-regard and near-total parochialism. Most of which spoof still holds true . . .
Except that it turns out New Yorkers don’t know all that much about themselves, either.
New York magazine last week reported the results of a poll about the city comparing answers from 400 local residents to those offered by 400 Republican primary voters from elsewhere around the country. Each group was asked what percentage of New Yorkers they thought were “Jewish,” “black,” “welfare recipients,” “millionaires,” and “gay or lesbian.” And in each case, it was the locals who made higher-end guesses, thereby embracing every hoary stereotype about their city.
The Republicans, being of a more latitudinarian and worldly disposition, were noticeably less likely to see Jews and blacks and homosexual welfare queens under every Manhattan mattress.
Also, just for the record, the Republican guesses came closer to the truth.
Boo hoo hoo . . .
Here are a couple of paragraphs from the lead editorial in last Wednesday’s New York Daily News that we wish we’d written:
No hoods, no torture. And they’re in and out of the court system in 23 hours, give or take, just like the standard prostitutes, petty pilferers and pill pushers who get processed through Manhattan Criminal Court. Darn hard to get treated like an important political prisoner in this town. This injustice needs to be protested.
Meanwhile, your conscience requires you to cry out against whatever oppressions you’ve got to work with. In this case, well, these abusive jailhouse conditions are just shocking. No vegan sandwiches, just baloney. Nothing but Dixie cups to drink from. Small wonder they’re all calling the holding cell “Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson.” Where are the international human-rights monitors, Amnesty International and the like, when you need them?
Boo hoo hoo . . .
