Sarah Vowell: When Bush Falls in Love

[gristy]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/opinion/26vowell.html

Here's the last paragraph. You'll have to read the whole thing to find out where the title of the piece comes from.

Bonhomie, as our ex-cronies the French call it, should have its limits. Seems as if American voters picked the current president because they thought he'd be a fun hang at a cookout — a jokey neighbor who charred a mean burger and is good at playing Frisbee with his dog. What we should be doing is electing a president with the nitpicky paranoia you'd use to choose a cardiologist — a stunted conversationalist with dark-circled eyes and paper-cut fingertips who will stay up until 3 tearing into medical journals in five languages trying to figure out how to save your life.

[salvorhardin]

1. I'd like to read it

But it's a Times Select article and I don't want to pay for it.

[depakid]

2. I wouldn't pay the Times a nickle

after what they've done over the past several years.

The original poster might have given a few more paragraphs, tho....

Here's a couple courtesy of Lexis/Nexis:

"The charges of cronyism against the current administration have piled up higher than the rotting rubble in New Orleans: ''Heck of a job, Brownie,'' is fast replacing ''Way to go, Einstein'' as the wiseacre-to-dummy put-down du jour. And what of Harriet Miers, the good friend/lame nominee for the Supreme Court the president defended as ''plenty bright.''

Then there's the 24-year-old political appointee who was rewarded for working on the president's re-election campaign with a job as a press aide at NASA, where he was accused of trying to silence a top climate scientist who is, go figure, concerned about global warming. That, and he demanded that the apparently too science-y NASA Web site insert the word ''theory'' after every use of ''Big Bang.''

<snip>

Then I remember -- wait, neither I nor any crony of mine has ever slept through the soggy downfall of an entire city, or failed to track down the genocidal maniac who still has a few American items left to check off on his mass-murder To Do list, or sent our soldiers to wage a berserk war crisscrossing the most dangerous roads in the world in flimsy vehicles with the protective capability of Vespa scooters. (But my comrades and I would like to apologize for that reading we ''organized'' at a noisy Chinatown restaurant in '98, when the short stories were drowned out by egg roll orders.)

[salvorhardin]

4. Thanks

I was just bithching about Times Select. ;-)

[SmokingJacket]

3. I get the paper version and read it this morning.

Eh. I don't know why she gets a column now; she's a comic writer, and not super-astute politically, IMHO. (not that funny either, but that's just me.) She kind of makes light of his cronyism, and doesn't say anything new, but makes it sound new by using extreme metaphors.

I think they brought her in to appeal to a certain demographic -- which I happen to be in -- and that's good, I guess.

[salvorhardin]

5. I love Sarah Vowell

But I'd love to see Julia Sweeney as a NY Times columnist even more. I mean, if the Times is going to go for that demographic.

[SharonAnn]

6. She was on The Daily Show rerun tonight and I loved her again!

She was just as funny the second time.