He's only 50. I thought he was older.
Soul and sweep, ogged. That's everything in politics.
Is it just me or is the mental image of Clinton surfing the web to find video of Lenny Kravitz's penis pretty funny as far as politician jokes go?
Possibly I thought he was older because I confused him with Frank Rich.
You're trapped in an elevator with Franks Bruni and Rich. What do you do, hotshot? What do you do?
I'd probably just hit the alarm button and try the emergency phone. I know a guy who ripped open the doors and then fell down the shaft. I don't know if he ever walked again.
The alarm button doesn't work! The phone is dead! Bruni wants to defend his book about George W. Bush! He's trying to recruit you to his defense! Rich suggests you read books by his wife and son, copies of which he happens to have with him! No escape, Moby! No escape!
Didn't Rich write an identical column about Gore?
The NYT opinion page did the same shit to Al Gore. "He is too stiff." "His attempts at being less stiff are ridiculous."
Just keep repeating "It could be Brooks. It could be Brooks."
Powned by SP. luckily for Obama black people can't be inauthentic
Herman Cain really tested the boundaries on that one.
If you really want to be annoyed check out the difference between "reader recommends" and "NYT recommends" comments. One is a thoughtful consideration of the questions and problem he raised, and how it represents things about Clinton. The other has comment after comment of "What the HELL is this shit NYT? Why don't you all die in a fire?" I know they manipulate that stuff in order to present whatever pretty/convenient picture they're looking for, but in this case it's really amazingly glaringly obvious what they're doing.
Frank Bruno was a pretty good heavyweight in his day but he only really does pantomime these days. Surprised to find him writing about American politics in the NYT.
I feel like that's a pretty good description of the majority of people who write about American politics in the NYT. Actual insight is not a preferred quality - what they really want is someone to repeat/reinforce whatever conventional wisdom happens to be in the social circles that NYTs people frequent.
I don't disagree with 16, really, but as Emerson might put it, you have to add in the ownership's preferences as well. Which are not merely sales figures, but also viewpoint reinforcement.
Oh Christ, this "who would you rather have a beer with?" bullshit again. Fucking assholes. I'd rather have a beer with Trump so I could glass the motherfucker, but I'll still vote for Hillary if she gets the nomination.
The NYT opinion page did the same shit to Al Gore. "He is too stiff." "His attempts at being less stiff are ridiculous."
It's one of those infuriating "women who try too hard are unlikeable" rigged games, but the author is describing the phenomenon, not condoning it.
19: Yes, they aren't part of the problem - they just go on and on talking about the problem and on and on describing how pathetic it is that she has to deal with this and how ridiculous she seems when she tries to overcome this, and gosh, why is it that I can't stop talking about this when they are actually important issues to discuss, but I just can't get over how stupid she looked, and did you see that outfit? OMG!
You're trapped in an elevator with Franks Bruni and Rich. What do you do, hotshot? What do you do?
That's when it would be OK to cry.
I have a good friend who is super plugged into the world of totally prominent, mainstream Democrats and media people (yes, Atrios, Villagers, but most don't live in DC) who have an insane hatred for Hillary. I follow some of their conversation on Facebook. In my buddy's personal case it's pretty clear that his own beef is simply that the patronage went in the wrong direction in the 90s, so that's at least explicable, if craven. But I genuinely don't understand where it comes from for most of these people -- they're mostly neither to the left nor the right of Hillary (or Obama, for that matter), they're not worked up about her foreign policy, they acknowledge that Hillary is a competent politician, but they just hate her personally and dream of Joe Biden. We're now at least 25 years into the Clinton phenomenon and I still don't get the mainstream resistance of this group of people.
I'm reminded of DeLong saying she should be kept far away from the presidency (he might have revised his view more recently). I think it's really hard to be an engaged political spouse without pissing people off (apparently people who knew Saint Elizabeth Edwards hated her, too), and obviously her gender makes it even harder to pull off the "authoritative with a common touch" requirement.
My guess would have to be that it's based in a general Clinton hatred which showed up pretty much the second they arrived in DC (which, I'm guessing, was very, very class based). And then there were eight years of desperate scrabbling in an attempt to get rid of them/find something, anything wrong which ended in almost nothing (and certainly nothing anyone outside of their circles cared about), which was probably kind of humiliating for them too.
At this point though I'm guessing it's one of those "but we hated them so much for so long that there must have been a reason for it" hatreds, which often end up even stronger than justifiable ones purely because there's literally nothing substantive they can point at to justify it. Add that to years of standard right wing woman hatred slurs* that they gleefully talked about as well and took on board, because obviously Limbaugh is an important conservative voice to discuss, and you could get something really hideously serious going on hatred-wise. Just imagine how the NYT will be acting if she gets elected president! It'll be awesome?**
*I don't know why but even the right seems to, relatively speaking, be leaving Obama's family mostly alone. When I remember the '90s it's still shocking just how nasty the right (and the press) were to not just Hillary but Chelsea as well. They're kind of surly about Michelle Obama, in a sort of half hearted racial/gendered slurs way, but Sasha and Malia seem to be almost invisible/completely out of bounds to them which is really shocking because the people who threw around the stuff about the Clintons are some of the worst people in the world and don't seem to have any compunctions about smearing people in the nastiest ways possible.
**Hillary Clinton still seems to be looked at generally positively by most people in the face of all their efforts (which is yet another enraging thing), so it might have the positive effect of revealing to more lower-information people how ideological the NYT can be.
I doubt I'm in accord with the political perspective of these Democratic Villagers, and presumably their personal hatred of her is just that: personal.
That said, my resistance was cemented upon reading that once upon a time, she and Bill had a saying: "First Bill, then Hill." (For the White House.) That comes from the 'Hillary must be stopped' article in Harpers a while back. In truth I have no idea if it's apocryphal, so I shouldn't take it to heart, but every time I see her, I hear that.
I do remember the stuff about Chelsea. Rush was horrible, even for Rush.
23 made me curious and since he's apparently not here right now I googled and found this reconsideration -- http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/04/endorsing-hillary-rodham-clinton.html
27:
Thanks for that; I may just send it to my wife.
You realise, people, that he's not fucked up, nobody shot him, he's not been disgraced by scandal, and he banged on ACA, ARRA, Title II, and no new coal ever?
I do remember the stuff about Chelsea. Rush was horrible, even for Rush.
Wasn't she only 12 or 13 years old at the time? What a vile, hateful little man.
John McCain shamefully got in on that act at some Republican donor event:
"Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?"
"Because Janet Reno is her father."
I seriously am curious about why Sasha/Malia haven't gotten any kind of nastiness at all, though.
Is it because Obama's family is, in general, just ridiculously charismatic? Is it because Obama gives the impression of someone who will absolutely not take it well if someone went after his children, to the point where it might involve genuine danger to them? (All/none of the above?) It just seems weird given the level of pure malevolence directed at Chelsea Clinton when Bill Clinton was president, and how they all seem to hate Obama even more than they did Clinton, and with a really impressive level of delusion even compared to the various "Vince Foster"/"whitewater"/"Clinton-kill-list" stuff from the '90s.
I've wondered about that too -- I remember back in '08 being poised to be enraged if anyone said a nasty thing about the Obama girls, and I never had to cash in that outrage.
My only two theories are that (a) Chelsea was actually kind of funny looking, in a perfectly normal teenage way, but there was some awkwardness there to hang the jokes off of. And there's a way in which 'ugly' jokes can be defended as sort of objective and impersonal -- the defense is "Nothing against her, but look at the picture -- the kid really is ugly." It's cruel, and unpleasant, and kind of disgusting, but it's hard to argue about. The Obama girls are both much prettier, which means that to be nasty about them, you'd need to accuse them of actual misconduct, which is a step nastier and probably requires lying. And (b) the race thing: it might be hard to come up with insults as unpleasant as the ones aimed at Chelsea that didn't make you sound like a mouthbreathing KKK member when you aimed them at a pair of innocent black teenagers. The age of the targets might make it hard to stay on the plausibly deniable side of horribly racist.
I think it's because we have improved as a society.
[Shoves fingers in ears while chanting "La, La, can't hear you, la, la."]