Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Democrats listen to their hearts, Republicans listen to Limbaugh...

...and I should have listened to Florence King.

From '91 through about '97, every place I worked had someone who dragged in their copies of National Review. I've never subscribed, being more of a Reason gal myself, but there was always an interesting tidbit or two, plus the magazine's main attraction, which was Miss King's column. When I went to work at the airport, it meant going cold turkey on "The Misanthrope's Corner," save for the occasional newsstand read.

In my current reading of STET, Damnit!, I'm now up into the material I've never read before; specifically, I'm deep into her coverage of the 2000 election. Do you know what Miss King was calling Dubya as far back as August of '00? "Lyndon Baines Bush". How very prescient.

I also empathized with her commentary on Fiasco '96, when Dole went so far out of his way to prove that Bob Dole can be as vaguely nice as Bill Clinton: "I... no longer count myself among Republicans. They're pussyfooting, henpecked invertebrates - all mouth and no gonads - and I'm through with them."

I know I sound like a broken record, but this is good stuff. You should buy a copy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Florence King retired.

They gave her spot to Jonah flippin' Goldberg.

And I haven't picked up an issue of National Review since.

And I have to agree that Reason is a wonderfully thought provoking magazine. Even when you can tell the articles are just playing Devil's Advocate to tweak the opposition.

Matt G said...

I used to have a sergeant who listened every night to his podcast of Rush Limbaugh. If any conversation turned to politics, and I commented in any way. Any WAY, Tamara, I was deemed a dirty Liberal, because I was either disagreeing in some way with a position that Rush had said, or I was basically saying the same thing, but with less strong verbiage. I decided that he didn't know what the word meant.

Then I decided that, if someone that closed-minded and sychophantic hated a type of person, perhaps I wanted to look more closely at what that type of person was.

Matt G said...

(worst part about these comments is that you can't edit them. I meant to say "...in any way --in ANY way, Tamara-- then I was...")