How you can tell the permanent presidential campaign really is in pause mode in spite of the commentariat: when its gumshoe department as represented by
Adam Nagourney of the New York Times (famed for his hard-hitting work on
Cap'n McCain) is reduced to writing epic screeds on the latest plague to afflict Hollywood, "swatting", in which pranksters call LA's police to report ghastly crimes being committed at the homes of celebrities of the Russell Brand caliber, so as to bring down a SWAT team.
The Los Angeles Police Department sent officers racing up the narrow twists and turns of North Doheny Drive leading to the Brand home. There, guns drawn in a cul-de-sac, they found only a shocked and frightened housekeeper taking out the garbage. Mr. Brand had left 30 minutes earlier.
Ooh, Mr. Nagourney, your paragraphs are so—taut!
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| Chinese swat team, by 9one. |
Of course there is a campaign going on in New York City, but all the candidates to date seemed doomed to be politicians instead of reality-show contestants, in spite [jump]
of some
pretty massive press efforts, until
Jonathan van Meter for the Times thought of poor old Anthony Wiener, who
might be persuaded to run for mayor, and can be pictured as living in a kind of internal exile, baking the bread and feeding the baby like the post-heroin John Lennon:
He seems to spend much of his time within a five-block radius of his apartment: going to the park with Jordan; picking up his wife’s dry cleaning and doing the grocery shopping; eating at his brother Jason’s two restaurants in the neighborhood. This is what happens after a scandal: Ranks are closed and the world shrinks to a tiny dot. It is a life in retreat.
I'll tell you, in the building where I work, there are occasionally auditions held for symphony orchestras, and I once found myself amused by a musician warming up locked in a men's room toilet stall. You know what the instrument inevitably was—a viola. By a kind of singularity effect, the
viola joke has somehow incarnated itself and shown up in person, with a wide stance. In the same way, Anthony Wiener has come to incarnate the dick joke, and I'm afraid it's too late for him to run for mayor now. Dancing with the Stars perhaps.
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| Dwarf SWAT, from the New Evolution game CyberSlums. |
Senator Rand Paul, apparently already running for 2016, gets the Mean Girls treatment in the Reader's Digest version prepared by
Dana Milbank:
“Edward Brooke!” several in the audience called out.
“Edwin Brookes,” Paul repeated.
The students broke out in hysterics. The laughter had barely subsided when Paul posed a question. “If I were to have said, ‘Who do you think the founders of the NAACP are?’ . . . would everybody in here know they were all Republicans?”
“Yes,” several could be heard grumbling. “Of course they would,” one woman informed him.
Paul dug himself in deeper. “I don’t know what you know,” he said.
No, indeed! Nor does he know how true he speaks, that he not only doesn't know
how much the Howard students know, but that he also doesn't know those particular facts.
Nor does Milbank; I mean to say, Milbank knows exactly what Paul knows, that during the New Deal FDR kept offering black people stuff, mortgages and cell phones or whatever they used to have in those days, while the Republicans only offered Freedom. But he doesn't realize that the Republicans and the African Americans started breaking up long before that, back about 1877, when the Bloody Shirt Party threw Reconstruction under the bus as part of the deal whereby Rutherford B. Hayes would serve as president even though he had lost the election. Right, those Republicans. The Party of Lincoln didn't survive Old Abe himself by long, but became the Party of Bush longer ago than you might have remembered.
On the post-snark front, Gershom Gorenberg on the "mysterious Mr. Kerry" shows how genuinely interesting writing can be applied to matters of state:
Curiously polite things happen while he in in the neighborhood. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for instance, postponed his previously announced trip to Gaza, lest he cause Israel grief. Kerry does not explain how he inspires such thoughtfulness.
