The Voice of Treason

I like Bill Bennett. He has this bearish, big dog quality that I find immensely appealing. He’s smart. He’s solid. He’s not a racist. But you wouldn’t know that if you were listening to the media this week. Again, they’ve taken one sentence out of a whole conversation and run with it.

He was on Hannity & Colmes, unapologetic, and fiercely stood his ground. Good for him. He has reason to be outraged. Calling Bill Bennett a racist is like calling Jack Kemp a racist. It makes no sense.

In a nutshell, this is what happened. In a discussion during his radio talk show, a pro-life caller made the assumption that if there were no abortions, all those surviving fetuses might have grown up to be productive American taxpayers that would be pouring money into the economy. The result would be a stronger GNP and a more solvent Social Security system.

Bill Bennett then said that the argument, on the surface, might seem to make good sense, but warned that hypotheticals like that should be avoided. There are better arguments against abortion. Please note here that Bennett is virulently anti-abortion and is firmly pro-life. And that’s precisely why the brouhaha over his comments makes absolutely no sense.

With the book Freakonomics and wacky arguments put forth to support positions in mind, Bennett offered up one example to the caller. Let’s say you want to reduce the crime rate. You could abort every black baby in the country and your crime rate would come down.

He stated a fact. This is not racist. Years of statistics support this argument. But the press has neglected to supply the rest of Bennett’s quote. That doing such a thing is morally reprehensible. It might fix the problem, yes, but it’s just something that could not be done. Similarly, we can fix a lot of society’s problems, but we don’t because the solution would be as horrible as the original problem. (Think Hitler’s solution to his “Jewish problem.”)

Intelligent people heard Bennett and understood precisely what he was saying. And they were probably happy to hear someone talk openly and rationally about race instead of skirting the issue or mincing words.

But the media got wind of this and made it an issue. My beef is that the Right should be firmly on Bennett’s side, defending him and making clear that only half the quote has been reported. Instead, they’re hiding under desks. Even the White House issued some weirdass statement about the quote being “inappropriate.” What they were thinking was: “Gee, Bill. Now is not the time to be talking about race because, after this little hurricane episode, everyone thinks we don’t care about black - er — African-Americans. If we defend you on this we’re going to dig a deeper hole, so we’re going to back away from you - just as if you were one of those corpses on a New Orleans overpass. Sorry!”

I understand the position, but I don’t condone it. The White House just blew an opportunity to get a hold of this whole race issue and open a discussion. Everyone on the Left knows that Bill Bennett isn’t a racist and everyone fully understands the point he was making. But they’ve chosen to twist it and misrepresent his message. Bill Bennett has been on the right side of addressing education and drug issues in the black community for decades, and they have the nerve to try to wipe that off the record with this crap?

Kudos to Rush for being as outraged as Bennett. He’s issued a statement of support and has planted his own quote:

“Bill Bennett should be applauded!”

The press will run with this, too, and say: “See? What have we been telling you? Limbaugh’s a racist!”

The Left is still stuck on stupid. They’re first to complain about talk radio and say it’s just right wing nuts shouting down sensitive, thoughtful callers who have an alternate opinion. They don’t get it. Bill Bennett has a program that welcomes intelligent discussion on tough - and sensitive - issues. If more show hosts could follow his lead, we could start talking about problems honestly and solve them. But that’s obviously way too scary.

If we solved the race problem, too many people would be out of their race-baiting jobs. It’s like tax reform. How could we possibly lose our beloved IRS? What would all these tax-preparers, lawyers, and accountants - and all those beloved IRS employees - do if we went to a fair or flat tax?

If we cured cancer, what would all those who have built their careers on cancer do for a living?

All together now: SOMETHING ELSE!

And that could be a good thing. All that brain power could be directed somewhere else. But don’t hold your breath. There’s a cure for most diseases, unfair taxation, poverty, ignorance, and racism. But if a thoughtful, intelligent person like Bill Bennett can’t even discuss these topics, you think our government can?

Where’s the leadership? Where’s the balls? Where’s the candidate who will campaign against political correctness and talk about issues openly and honestly without fear of the media?

STOP THE MUZZLING NOW!

I don’t know if I feel worse about the tens of thousands of chickens who roasted in the Southern California fire or the twenty-two chickens in the U.S. Senate.

What’s more tragic? Innocent fowl trapped inside a farm, burning to death - or twenty-two foul members of the Senate voting against Judge Roberts?

Republicans have no guarantee that the new Chief Justice will be conservative. Similarly, the Democrats have no guarantee that he will be liberal. He was grilled over and over again about his possible agenda. Is he an ideologue? Does he lean too far to the right?

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he’ll start off that way, then turn the opposite direction in a few years. Maybe he’ll be in the middle somewhere. Maybe he’ll vote one way, then another - on one side, and then the other. Maybe he’ll die prematurely. Who knows?

What is known is his resume and his reputation. He might just be the best qualified nominee to come along in decades, and twenty-two Senators voted against him. Who, then, has the agenda? Who are the ideologues?

If he is, as many suspect, the best man for the job, why would you want it on record that you tried to prevent him from having the position?

Patrick Leahy did the right thing. Shame on those who did not.

Phil Keating’s back with an update about that dog. We’re pretty sure he got out of the canal. We think he’s going to be all right. He’s out of the water.

Yeah, fine. But he’s still homeless and starved and scared. FNC pointed out that one of their producers actually adopted a Katrina dog. “It kept coming up to our crew, so she made arrangements to have it sent to Los Angeles.” Great. That’s one life saved. How ’bout the 49,999 others out there? Or is that just another number a reporter pulled out of his ass?

Because the human corpses haven’t been piling up quite the way the media had hoped for, they’ve turned their focus back to the animal victims. The pets, the livestock, the zoo and aquarium animals. I think they’ve rescued three of the eight aquarium dolphins who ended up in the gulf. We have to save them!

As Rush pointed out: “We have to save them from natural habitat?”

Someone should have saved the cats in Northern England. Over a hundred dead cats were found in an abandoned apartment there - their bodies stuffed behind radiators and in a freezer.

And speaking of dead cats, the Democrats are going after Tom DeLay again. And Bill Frist. Frankly, they’re going after anything that looks and smells like a Republican. We were watching poor Scott McClellan get grilled by the press and T asked: “Is there no respect? How can they talk to him this way?”

Dude! Where have you been? This is standard operating procedure. If they can talk to the President this way, what’s to keep them from attacking his press secretary? And speaking of grilling, was that Louisiana’s William Jefferson questioning Michael Brown this week? Isn’t Jefferson under federal investigation?

And speaking of federal investigations, would someone take time out of their busy Republican-lynching schedules to take a look at what’s going on in my state? The state treasurer and his predecessor are in it deep - and the governor-who-would-be-president might just be in there with them.

This story has been buried. I know that there are people e-mailing Rush, Matt Drudge, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity about the corruption, but so far it hasn’t gotten much traction. I suspect it’s because no one knows this is a state.

Oh - and Southern California’s on fire again. ‘Tis the season. Hmm. Let’s see just how much George Bush cares about rich Hollywood people.

I need to stop sleeping with the TV on. I woke up this morning to Phil Keating on FNC, standing near a drainage canal in New Orleans, pointing out a dog treading water - exhausted and scared - and trapped in the canal. The dog paused to rest, clinging to the filters.

It’s been a month since that hurricane and there are still pets out there wandering the streets of New Orleans. This is the stuff that makes people nuts. It’s one thing having human beings’ lives disrupted, but innocent pets - well, some of us just can’t bear it. FNC was swamped with inquiries about that dog. Phil Keating had to check in periodically with updates. He explained that it hadn’t been rescued, but he was pretty sure it had found its way out of the water. Not good enough for FNC viewers. He had to prove the dog was okay, but he couldn’t.

Time to surf. Oh, there’s Michael Brown getting reamed on national television. Frankly, I was happy to see that Mr. Brown had come to realize that he was out of a job, so he had nothing to lose. He stood up for himself and even got a little bristly at times. One line, after he was criticized for not getting ice to the people in a timely manner, was especially good. To paraphrase: “It’s not the federal government’s job to make sure your beer and diet Coke is cold.” Something like that. But as harsh and politically incorrect as that might sound, the statement makes sense. It’s sad that this man has become the scapegoat for the disaster and that the mayor of Nawlins and Louisiana’s governor go unscathed. It’s clear they’ll be re-elected, so what does that say about the electorate?

Well, it says they are stupid and can be easily manipulated. Case in point: Republican congressman Peter King was pretty straightforward with Chris Matthews this week. He excoriated Matthews and his ilk for spewing misinformation about Katrina and being so nauseatingly self-congratulatory about it. You know, there was a time that TV reporters were strangers. Viewers knew nothing about these people; their function was simply to speak clearly and report the news. Now they’re freaking celebrities. I know their opinions, where they were raised, where they went to school, what designers they wear, who they dated or married, and what their kids look like. Are these people journalists or actors? It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make that distinction.

Like King says: “You say Bush isn’t doing his job, but the truth is that Bush isn’t watching you. It doesn’t mean he’s not doing his job!”

Thank you! Unfortunately, too many people are watching Matthews and his chums, and they think they’re getting the facts. Wake up! It’s all a show and they’re manipulating you! You can smell it!

Another case in point. That new series with Geena Davis is just one example of how you - the average American - is getting set up again. Hollywood is going to convince you that a female president is not that farfetched. Hell, if Geena Davis can be leader of the free world, then Hillary Clinton should be able to pull it off, too. Once you get it in your head that a woman can be president, then it’ll be easier for you to go to the polls and vote for the candidate with ovaries.

It’s a script! It’s fiction! It’s fantasy! It’s burlesque! It’s theatre! Smoke and mirrors. When you have twenty-
four hours a day to fill, you’ll fill it with just about anything.

Beware.

I damned near crashed the car on Friday when Rush debuted the new Paul Shanklin parody of The Association’s Windy.

Who’s flaming out and can’t get arrested
Who blamed the Jews for starting the war
Used by the left to capture the moment
Everyone knows it’s Cindy

Who’s on a bus to come to your city
Whining to everybody she sees
Who never ever gets a tough question
Everyone knows it’s Cindy

There are liberal versions of the song, too, but I’m not sure they’re as amusing. Frankly, conservative humor is funnier. It’s like SNL. Saturday Night Live is - have you watched it lately? - dreadful. It’s like they’re still stuck on drug humor, and everyone knows that drug humor is only funny if you’re on drugs.

It reminds me of the time I made the mistake of going on a road trip to Colorado with a bunch of coworkers. I was coming down with TB or something and I chose not to drink on the trip. Bad choice. We all shared one hotel room and the room was on my credit card. And I was the only sober person there. It was not amusing.

It’s why I watch Public Access and Free Speech TV, and surf Leftist sites. If I read National Review exclusively, I’d be having way too much fun. People need to suffer, so I surf.

I recently landed on a leftist t-shirt site. “Bush is a biggot.” Biggot? Is that left wing code? An inside joke? A new word? I know there’s a word that’s similar, but it has only one “g.” What is a biggot? Should I feel stupid now because I don’t get it? Did they misspell it intentionally, thinking that red state people would be able to understand it because they think bigot is biggot?

I’m spending way too much time on this, I thought. Then I saw another shirt:

Karl Rove — The Voice of Treason!

There’s a bumpersticker, too. I might have to have that and edit it a bit. “Karl Rove killed my kittens” was a little too disturbing, so I kept surfing.

To balance the anti-war rally and the anti-Bush film on Public Access (It was a long video of a bumpy drive through the northern part of the state with a voice-over endlessly explaining that Bush and his patriarchal regime was going to mean the end of civilization as we know it. This is not art, I told myself. Not even good political commentary. This is just damned bad filmmaking.), I watched a bit of the Move America Forward rally. I landed on it, thinking it was still the A.N.S.W.E.R. rally, and wondered why everyone was suddenly more articulate, better groomed, and not shouting. Different rally!

There was a band (The Right Brothers) that played a very catchy tune - “Bush Was Right!” - and then they all said thank you, picked up any trash on the ground, and went quietly home. Red state people.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get better, C-SPAN aired a debate. George Galloway v. Christopher Hitchens. Ohmigod! It was like Gore Vidal and Bill Buckley all over again! I was riveted.

Hitchens kept reminding the Baruch College audience to not be so quick to applaud Galloway’s statements. “You’re on TV. There’s a camera. Your parents might be watching this.”

It might have gone right over their heads. What he was gently reminding them of was that one day they would grow up and remember that there was a time when they were on the wrong side of the issues and they would feel embarrassed. Maybe even guilty.

I, too, was young once. It happens to the best of us.

I took the weekend off from Rita to watch C-SPAN’s coverage of the book festival and an assortment of rallies, both for and against the war. The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition was there on the Mall with their “Rally Against The War In Iraq.” Well, that was fun.

It’s not that I enjoy bad poetry or hearing odd-looking people scream at me, but I do like giving the other side the opportunity to make asses of themselves. Again, “you people” have a microphone; why do you continue to scream?

All sorts of socialist/communist/anarchist/environmentalist/feminist groups took time out of their busy schedules to saunter on down to the Mall to display signs and bad hairdos. If you thought tie-dye was dead, you were wrong. It lives. And it’s still atrocious.

I like to tune in to these rallies because C-SPAN is kind enough to air them and it gives me a chance to catch up on pop culture. What are the bohemians wearing these days? What are the catch phrases? Who do they hate? What are prescription frames looking like? These are things I need to check on occasion since I no longer spend time near a university campus or at an artsy non-profit.

It’s Woodstock without the music and mud. I listened to enough bad poetry to make me want to write some of my own. I had to hear how the neocons were destroying the planet. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice were all very bad people who hated everyone else - to the point of wanting them dead (especially if they were poor, black, female, Muslim, or Arab-looking). Bad, evil, greedy, warmongering people. Racists, fascists, sexists, religious fanatics, and stupid, too.

Yeah, whatever. Time to go to the other side of the Mall and look at the book people. A calmer, quieter group for the most part. Andrew Carroll (Behind The Lines) was there talking about The Legacy Project and warletters.com. His words were compelling — both funny and heartbreaking. And Tom Wolfe was pulled aside for an interview on the grass. Another little excursion with Tom. He’s just a hoot. Then John Irving staggered by and was reeled in for an interview, too. He and Updike aren’t what you call fans of Mr.Wolfe and are quick to criticize him, yet they are even quicker to complain when they are criticized. So sensitive, these East Coast intellectual types.

Irving used to look healthier. Athletic even. Now he looks like such a reprobate. He was kind enough to offer his opinion on current events, the war, and the administration, but he was also kind enough to not scream. In his condition, he might have fallen over.

I must digress. For years, everyone told me I had to read Garp. Please, I told them, don’t make me read this. I can’t read popular fiction. The same way I can’t run out and see the big new film. It’s not that I think our culture has bad taste and would steer me wrong, it’s just that our culture has bad taste and would steer me wrong. I had the book on the shelf where it collected dust and animal hair for a long, long time. People would see me and run up to ask: “Have you read Garp yet? You’ll love it. You write just like him - really you do!” I’d explain that as much as I’d been meaning to get around to it, life events - deaths, illnesses, catastrophes, finals — were keeping me from it. Then it happened. During the summer before my final year of school, when I would be finishing up my degree and starting my student teaching, I took a job. There was a sixteen year-old girl working with us. We assumed she had very bad acne and we were too polite to discuss it, so we had absolutely no clue — until the job and summer ended and we had all been infected — that what she had was chicken pox.

What a treat. I had just said to myself a few weeks before how happy I was that I seemed to be past acne. My skin was looking good; was this adulthood? Someone must have heard me and thought I needed to be punished. I watched The Lion In Winter on PBS and fell asleep on the couch. I woke up not knowing where I was or what time it was. I staggered off to bed. In the morning I woke up from a weird dream, but was still in a dream state. Foggy, I remembered in the dream that I was searching for something. I rolled out of bed and struggled to my feet. I had to find it. What? I don’t know, but I have to find it. I started to walk but fell against a bookcase. Odd. Why am I dizzy? I need to wake up. I need to find…whatever it is I’m looking for. I took a few more steps and fell against the dresser. I looked up and saw my reflection in the mirror. Something didn’t look right. That’s it! I can’t see - it’s a blur. I must be looking for my glasses. Where are my glasses? Oh, here.

Then I looked in the mirror again. Something was very wrong. It looked like I had small pox. I looked at my hands, arms, legs. I was covered with these reddish pink blisters. They were in my ears, between my toes, on the bottoms of my feet, in my mouth, up my nose, and…well, everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

And I was alone in my little college town. Luckily a friend was still around, so I called her and she brought groceries to my door. She explained that she had to leave them on the porch because she couldn’t bear to look at me.

Trapped in the house. With The World According To Garp. What the hell, I told myself. I’ve got pox on top of pox and they’re starting to ooze green. Can this book be any worse?

It must have been the fever, but I admit that I sort of enjoyed the book. I’d even collected some of Irving’s other books - all quite awful really - and I went home to visit. I offered them to my sister. It was an odd time. I’d been buying a lot of paperbacks and discovered that there were issues with the printing. Pages were out of order. Some were blank. Some were missing entirely. I started to check each page of each book before I bought it. But I’d bought the Irving books before I’d discovered the quality control issues. I think they were Setting Free the Bears, The Water-Method Man, and The 158-Pound Marriage. Anyway, when I saw my sister she said:

“I hate you for making me read this book.”

I apologized about the missing pages and errors in the others.

“No apologies necessary. It was an improvement.”

I think I tolerated Irving’s books because I, too, have a special fondness for bears. But back to the book fest.

David Brooks appeared and spoke for a bit. Very amusing, very thoughtful. But a blustery anti-Semite (must have wandered over from the other side of the Mall) opened the Q & A with an attack. Something about blah, blah neocon blah Israel blah Iraq, blah blah Jewish cabal blah blah blah. He was booed by a mixed crowd. And that’s what’s good about books. Both sides can read and appreciate them. Even the Liberals in the crowd wanted to hear what Brooks had to say - not what the anti-Semite was spewing.

Brooks continued. “Yes, I am Jewish.” But he made several interesting points. One being that this period - 2000 to 2005 and perhaps beyond — will go down in history as “not a happy time.” I get that feeling, too. It will, no doubt, be a poor reflection on Bush - and it certainly isn’t his fault (he, like his father, just has awful timing) - but it will be, as Brooks says, “a period of bloodshed.”

Brooks went on to speak on many topics, but he got around to talking about college students. How Liberal Arts majors operate in paragraphs and become Democrats, while others choose majors that operate in numbers. Those people get jobs and become Republicans. He also noted that college educated people are more divided and ideological. High school grads are more open to both sides and might even vote for someone from the opposite party.

T accuses me of that. That I am rigidly one-sided and will only vote for one party. Not so. I would vote for a candidate of another party if I believed that person was better qualified. Maybe. I tell T he’s a Libertarian, but he refuses to be labeled. He hates the extremes and can’t understand why people can’t settle somewhere in the middle.

Here’s where Brooks makes an interesting point. The polls indicate that people might be moving away from the Right, Bush, and the Republicans, but they’re not moving to the Left and the Democrats. They’re hovering somewhere in the middle.

But speaking of Libertarians, Brian Lamb had interviewed Milton Friedman back in October 1994 and C-SPAN re-aired it. Lamb asked him what he’d majored in. Echoing Brooks, he said, “I wanted an income.” It’s how he ended up majoring in numbers: Mathematics and Economics. Imagine - he graduated from high school in 1928, attended Rutgers when it was a private institution, and accepted a scholarship in Economics at the University of Chicago during the Depression. It’s where he met Rose - the only girl in class.

His immigrant family had trouble finding success in business. “We were not poor. We weren’t at a very high income level, but we were NOT poor.” (By today’s standards, his family might have been destitute, but he was not going to be stuck in that mindset. NOT poor.)

But he admitted to Lamb that he was old. How old, Lamb asked. Friedman said 82 and I almost toppled. Still brilliant, articulate, quick-witted. But he felt he was slow to recover from the unexpected side effects of recent back surgery and he just wasn’t feeling all that well. Then Lamb referred to him as a conservative.

“I’m NOT a conservative! We (F.A. Hayek and Friedman) are liberals - in the true sense of the term, and not in the distorted, current sense of the term. People who are liberal with other people’s money.”

“Then what are you?,” Lamb asked.

“I’m a libertarian with a small l, and a Republican with a capital R.”

“What’s Bill Clinton?”

“Oh, he’s a Socialist!”

Very amusing stuff, but the Friedman line is a famous one - he just neglected to repeat the whole thing. What he’s been quoted as saying is:

“I am a libertarian with a small l and a Republican with a capital R. And I am a Republican with a capital R on grounds of expediency, not on principle.”

And doesn’t THAT describe a lot of us!

I’m hurricaned out. I was halfway through a blurb about the busload of nursing home evacuees that burst into flames when the computer took a dump. The last time this happened, I’d written something I was really happy with, and in a moment it was gone. I’d tried to reconstruct every line from memory and maybe captured 70%, but the rest just wasn’t quite the same. Perhaps the Cybergods are trying to tell me something, I thought. So I decided to put the old folks on the back burner - oops, sorry - and, like all the politicians are saying, move forward.

T set up a second computer while the other will wait for him to repair it. Until that one’s resurrected, I’ll work on this one. It’s the one that he was determined to donate to the non-profit that I left back in June. I’m glad now that I refused to put it in my car. I’m generous, but T takes generosity to a whole new level. To illustrate, I took a break from cable news the other day to watch the Travel Channel. Maybe in some way I wanted to escape my country for an hour or two, who knows?

They were on the Amalfi coast, sipping limoncello. My blood pressure started dropping immediately. “Someday…before I die,” I said to myself. Then an interesting tour of Jordan with King Abdullah II. Where am I going with this, you ask? The generosity thing. The King was explaining Bedouin hospitality. A Bedouin on a magnificent white horse had come across travelers in the desert and immediately invited them to lunch. They accepted and were presented with fifteen sheep. The guests later discovered that the Bedouin had sold his most valued possession - the white horse - in order to purchase the sheep lunch. That’s T to a T.

King Abdullah goes on to explain that the guest - I’m trying to remember if he said it was his father or some other relative - bought the horse back, as well as fifteen sheep, and gave them to the Bedouin. Fascinating story, but let me get back to where I started.

Okay. The plan was to stock up on adult beverages and watch Rita coverage around the clock. By Friday afternoon, I was catatonic. It was clear that even if Rita dwindled to a tropical storm and just blew the sign off one K-Mart, this was going to be covered like Katrina. I decided I just couldn’t go through it again. I surfed the channels one more time and watched the wet reporters clutching their microphones, unable to see any real difference between CNN, MSNBC, and FNC, so I surfed it away.

I’ve found that if there’s nothing interesting on QVC or the Food Network, my only refuge is C-SPAN. On Friday night I got lucky. I landed on the National Book Festival Gala. There’s Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales - oh, and Laura Bush is sitting next to Condi. What authors will show up tonight?

Linda Sue Park, Sue Monk Kidd, David McCullough, and Tom Wolfe all appeared at the podium to thank the Library of Congress and former teacher/librarian Laura Bush for putting this little book thing together. The writers read excerpts from their latest works and spoke of the importance of literature in society. Tom Wolfe was delightful. Those in the audience held their breath when he wandered off and started talking endlessly about sex. Somehow he ended up talking about cats whose brains had been surgically altered and were continually humping each other in the laboratory. Again, as odd as his tangents can be, he always makes a point at the end - you just have to stick with it and pay close attention.

Just when I thought he was about to cross the line with the cat excerpt from the new book or the baseball/sex analogy, he’d snap right back to some sense of decorum with a remark that was not only funny, but almost demure. One of the biggest guffaws of the evening came when Wolfe, in his signature white suit, paused to reach into his pocket for his reading glasses. The frames were, of course, stark white.

Whenever I think about the people I’d invite to a dinner party, Tom Wolfe is always somewhere on the list. He seems to be to be a low maintenance guest. “Tom, I need to check on the canapes. Can you amuse the others while I’m in the kitchen?”

If it’s true that Tom Wolfe is George Bush’s favorite author, it’s a shame George missed this because of a hurricane. But if Rita had hit while George was in a tuxedo at a gala, we’d never hear the end of it. Such is the life of a president.

I think I just figured out the secret of American politics. Years of watching late night TV has led me to believe that you can’t win the presidency unless you can be impersonated. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush (1), Clinton, Bush (2); what do they all have in common?

Any second-rate impressionist can do them. I was doing LBJ when I was six. Not to be confused with Monica Lewinsky, I was doing an impression of LBJ.

“Mah fellow Amurrikins. Ah come here today with a heavy heart. Ah just ate a pepperoni pizza.”

Yeah, it’s bad, but I was six.

I’ve been trying to do Jeb Bush. Again let me clarify: an impression of Jeb Bush. The problem is that I could probably imitate Jeb, but no one would know what I was doing unless I talked a lot about hurricanes, extensive evacuation plans, instructions on what to do and where to go, and how to get through it all without trauma — then repeated it all in Spanish.

The trick is to have noticeable speech patterns, a dialect, and quirks. A particular expression, too, is helpful.

Ahsk not what your country can do for you: Ahsk what you can do for your country.

Now let me say this about that.

Let me make this perfectly clear.

Malaise.

Well……

Not at this juncture.

Wouldn’t be prudent.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Noocueler.

Jeb needs to develop a tick. Or maybe a Clintonesque ATM gesture. I guess if you watch him long enough you can pick out little things he does. A slight sigh and slump…almost like a Saint Bernard…while he’s trying to make it clear for the umpteenth time that if you don’t move your ass right quick, the hurricane is going to get you.

He’s smart. He’s articulate. He’s steady. If he wants to be President, he’s going to have to start twitching. Or stuttering. Or mispronouncing words. Or scratching his chin. Something peculiar.

Right now he’s just too good to get elected.

Maybe it started when I saw Mayor Nagin show up to a press conference wearing a “DESIRE” t-shirt. I’m out of the loop, still trying to figure out which color bracelet means what these days. Was this a motivational t-shirt? Was it a tourist thing? Yes, it’s a Nawlins thing. The small print under the word “desire” is:

“If you want it badly enough, it will happen.”

A tad more lofty, depending on how you read it, than the other souvenir favorite:

“New Orleans: Proud to crawl home.”

Well, that got me thinking about a guilty pleasure of mine. Tennessee Williams. And then it all suddenly (last summer?) made sense. Governor Blanco…Blanco…Blanche? That spacy, ineffective, out of touch with reality, pathetic…Wait! Then does that mean that the boorish Mayor, with all his bellowing and vulgarity, is…Stanley?

This is, no doubt, a master’s thesis for some English or Theatre major. And now that Lovely Rita has shifted her path back towards Nawlins, the Crescent City is in the spotlight once more.

Leave the gun, take the beignets - it’s already raining hard on Bourbon Street.

The Guangzhou Haojian Bio-science Company is selling condoms named after a former president and the intern who serviced him in the Oval Office.

“We chose the name because we think Clinton is a symbol of success and a man of responsibility. And Lewinsky is a woman who dares to love and dares to hate,” says the company’s general manager, Liu Wenhua.

A review of the product:

“The Clinton condom is a masterpiece in prophylactic design. Finally someone has developed a condom to fit all shapes and sizes. It stretches and bends to match whatever position you choose. Not only that, but it’s extra-slickness guarantees you will always have the lubrication you need.”

Yes, bloggers are certainly having fun with this one. I’m sure Bill is pleased, too. From “Boxers or briefs?” to a condom named after him, this piece of human debris never fails to nauseate me.

Call me a romantic fool, but there is nothing romantic about the Clintons. Nixon’s “Checkers” speech had more romance.

“Well, that’s about it. That’s what we have and that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much but Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours. I should say this — that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.

One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something — a gift — after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was.

It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl — Tricia, the 6-year old — named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

Ronald Reagan wrote mushy letters to Nancy. Nancy gazing at Ron was criticized by the Left as phony, but her devotion was genuine. You try spending time with someone who has Alzheimer’s.

One of my favorite photos of George and Barbara Bush was taken when the two of them were in bed together. Their hair is tousled, the sheets are rumpled. There’s a pot of coffee, stacks of books and newspapers, and the spaniels are on the bed. Now that’s romantic.

The whole story of Dick and Lynne Cheney is the stuff that movies are made of. Even Dubya and Laura ooze more romance than Bill and Hillary. (Maybe “ooze” is a bad choice, so let me retract that.)

It reminds me of that kiss. That awful kiss between Algore and Tipper that sent Republicans screaming from the room. It was tawdry - like Bill Clinton kneeling to adjust the little flag that had fallen over. Staged, fake, uncharacteristic.

Ugh. I just thought of something. A condom named after the man in the wooden suit. Thank goodness he lost in 2000…