More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 4 - September 15, 2023
Haig, who alarmed the nation with his Strangelovian “I’m in control here” outburst
Bentsen, who up to this point had comported himself like a sly old cat, seemingly content to toy with Quayle as if he were a yarn mouse, was spring-loaded and ready to pounce.
To borrow terminology from the polysyllabic Quayle lexicon, it went over like a balloon of massive megatonnage.
Despite Quayle’s abysmal performance, the Republican ticket was headed for victory—in part because the Democrats, ignoring the Curse of Adlai Stevenson, had given the egghead strategy another shot. During the race for the nomination, the Democratic presidential field had featured no fewer than five eggheads. Eugene McCarthy was back, in a quixotic attempt to rekindle the magic of ’68. From Adlai’s home state of Illinois came Senator Paul Simon, who cemented his Poindexter cred by voluntarily wearing a bow tie. Also running was the former Colorado senator Gary Hart, a cerebral Yale Law School
...more
The three female journalists on the debate panel—Ann Compton, Margaret Warner, and Andrea Mitchell—had all tried to convince Shaw not to use Mrs. Dukakis’s name for the purposes of his attention-seeking stunt. Dismissive of the women, Shaw said, “I disagree with each of you and I’m not changing anything.” Though some blame Shaw’s question for ending Dukakis’s political career, the career it should have ended was Shaw’s.
Meanwhile, if the Quayle ordeal taught Bush Senior anything about the perils of choosing an unqualified nominee for an important position, he didn’t show it. If anything, winning big despite the albatross of Quayle might have emboldened him: in 1991, he tapped a man with only one year of judicial experience to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Thirty years later, the nation is still paying the price for his selection of Clarence Thomas.
w]e are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur,”
“Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things”;
Quayle was roasted nonstop for his blunder, including by Figueroa, who called the vice president an “idiot.” The twelve-year-old tried to walk back that insult while appearing on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, but his recantation made matters worse: “I know he’s not an idiot, but he needs to study more. Do you have to go to college to be vice president?”
First, it illustrates the astonishing reality that, as recently as 1992, misspelling a word could damage a politician’s career. Today, revisiting an era in American politics when spelling mattered is, sadly, like traveling to Colonial Williamsburg. In today’s politics, if spelling is relevant at all, it’s just another lightning rod for tribal grievances. In 2020, an online clip of Quayle’s spelling mishap inspired this comment by someone using the handle “lib hypocrites”: “The travesty was that Quayle wasn’t wrong. Either way is acceptable. Just more railroading by the leftist media.” Adding
...more
Rule of thumb: when a politician’s brain resides somewhere other than in the politician, uh-oh.
Hampered by a slim résumé and meager skills, he did what any young man with few prospects would do: he ran for Congress.
And third, Bush got the final boost he needed from a well-orchestrated whispering campaign accusing Richards of packing her gubernatorial staff with lesbians. Although the Bush team denied any involvement in this effort, which targeted the Bible-thumping precincts of East Texas, the ensuing anti-gay panic mirrored the bigotry stoked by his dad’s Willie Horton strategy six years earlier.
‘Blacks didn’t come out for me like the Hispanics did. So they’re not gonna see much help from me.’ ”
At a news conference about a heat wave that had already resulted in eighty deaths and rampaging forest fires, Bush gave a sneak preview of his devil-may-care response to Hurricane Katrina. Dubya called a Forestry Service official to the podium by yelling, “Tree Man, get up here!”
As the official spoke, Bush stuck out his tongue and puffed out his cheeks...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Considering that Bush clocked in for only about eight hours a week, one wonders how the Decider managed to decide the fate of the 152 men and women whose executions he approved (a record for gubernatorial serial killing surpassed only by his successor, the fellow pro-lifer Rick Perry, who offed 278).
Defending his controversial decision to execute Gary Graham, a convicted murderer whom many believed was innocent, Bush said, “This case has had full analyzation and has been looked at a lot. I understand the emotionality of death row penalty cases.” He somewhat undermined the credibility of his analyzation, however, when he declared, “I do not believe we’ve put a guilty… I mean, innocent person to death in the state of Texas.”
“We remember the sunniness of his temperament during eight years in office.” (Of course, that sunniness was only possible because Reagan ignored the decidedly unsunny plight of the unemployed, the homeless, the hungry, and those dying of AIDS, among others.)
As W. readied his first presidential campaign, Rove urged him to buy a ranchette in Crawford, Texas, to serve as a Reaganesque backdrop for photo ops. Before long, Dubya was yanking on the pull cord of his very own chain saw, fixing to clear some brush.
“[N]ot only does he not know a great deal, he’s defiant about it. He likes the idea.”
Aided by the largely fawning media, Bush’s ignorance became an asset: something voters could relate to, a sign he was “authentic” and “down-to-earth.”
The “Al Gore invented the internet” joke unfairly popularized his image as a grandiose fibber, but also reinforced another damaging perception about the vice president: that he was an elitist wonk whose obsession with science and technology alienated “ordinary people.”
(Since he also asked, famously, “Is our children learning?” one expected that his first official act as president would be to cancel the agreement between subjects and verbs.)
I don’t want a president who’s just like me. I’m pretty sure I’d suck at the job. I want a president to be better than I am: smarter, braver, calmer, and more patient. When a country faces war, economic collapse, or contagion, I’m not sure it’s Miller Time. Lincoln may have been our greatest president, but he wouldn’t be in my top hundred potential drinking buddies. He could get kind of dark.
was a testament to the viselike grip of the Age of Ignorance that another of our most informed politicians was paying tribute to one of our least.
With her toxic brew of ignorance and grievance, Sarah Palin was the gateway ignoramus who led to Donald Trump.
It was one year after that triumph that Palin’s ship came in—literally. The ship in question was Holland America Line’s MS Oosterdam, which, given its pivotal role in catapulting Sarah Palin onto the national scene, deserves a special place in maritime history alongside the Lusitania and the Titanic.
Upon meeting Palin, the seafaring Republicans proved far more easily impressed than Levi Johnston. Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc,” somehow neglecting to compare her to Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie Curie.
Barnes said he was “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.”
The “beauty queen” part seemed to make a particularly big impression on the ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Sarah roamed the nation’s universities like a ninja, leaving no trace.
Members of McCain’s inner circle had convinced themselves that Palin could attract disaffected Democratic women upset by their party’s failure to nominate Hillary Clinton—a realignment possible only if those women overlooked the fact that Clinton and Palin had as much in common ideologically as Batman and the Joker.
So, for that matter, did Palin’s expression of otherworldly calm when she was told she’d been chosen: “It’s God’s plan.” Her claim that Providence played a role in her selection, however, drew a skeptical response from Levi Johnston. “Sarah told the world that her being chosen was God’s plan,” he wrote. “It would be the first time I had ever heard her mention the fella.”
She was also shaky when it came to a former British colony, the United States of America. Answering a question about the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, Palin opined, “If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.” We’ll never know whether it was good enough for the Founding Fathers because the Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t written until 1892; the reference to God was inserted in 1954.
You can’t help noticing that while Palin called C. S. Lewis very, very deep, her familiarity with Dr. George Sheehan seemed very, very deeper.
In what was seen as another gotcha moment from the interview, Gibson asked Palin to defend a statement she’d made at her former place of worship, the Wasilla Assembly of God. In an appearance caught on video, Palin told her audience that American soldiers in Iraq were performing “a task that is from God.” Nervously backtracking with Gibson, she said that she “would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words.” A better answer might have been “What I said was no more crazy-ass than some of the shit our sitting president, George W. Bush, has said.” After his second inaugural as
...more
As campaign staff prepared her for the VP debate with Joe Biden, they realized that facts were indeed stupid things, and chucked the index cards.
As Dubya and Reagan both showed, if you don’t have facts to support your case, fear and hate are handy substitutes.
Instead of taking the quitter’s way out, Palin told Alaska, she would quit.
It was striking that a candidate who had spent her career in the company of men pretend-fighting in capes, masks, and tights feared that an association with Palin might undermine her seriousness.
At first glance, O’Donnell’s staunch anti-masturbation views seemed at odds with the Tea Party’s opposition to big government intruding on people’s lives, not to mention the Declaration of Independence’s enshrinement of the pursuit of happiness, but such contradictions didn’t shake her certainty.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
As the 2012 presidential election cycle neared, speculation abounded that Palin might, after four years of Barack Obama, offer the nation a Return to Abnormalcy.
“He warned the British that they weren’t going be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells, and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”
“You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington and Concord.” The response to this praise was subdued, possibly because her audience, unlike the Minnesota congresswoman, knew that the towns she was referring to were located next door, in Massachusetts.
“She’s more smarter.”
Although he never got a chance to eliminate that department as president, he did the next best thing, serving as energy secretary under Donald J. Trump.XV
Though these comments weren’t terribly persuasive, they did reveal Santorum as a man with a vivid fantasy life.
(Obama wants you to be educated like him—what a dick!)
