Omigod. I feel a pricking at my thumbs; something wicked this way comes.
In the meantime, please to enjoy Roger Simon, Pajamas Media CEO and (redundantly) Complete Chucklehead Git:
Yes, they really call me "Pajamas Media CEO!" In public!
OK, that was a joke. But that really is his byline, "Roger Simon, CEO of Pajamas Media." I bet his mom writes that on all his undies.
I believe in my heart that had Al Gore been elected president in 2000 (and as we all know he almost was – he won the popular vote), he would be just as knee deep in the War on Terror as George Bush is right now and fighting it in more or less the same manner. He would be in Iraq.
Yes, you read me correctly.
Oh noes!!! We is not Teh Stupiddd it is Teh Simon!!11!1!
Forget the Nobel Prize and the global warming Oscar, if Al Gore had been elected in ‘00, he’d be burning excess Air Force One fuel, jetting behind the lines to Anbar Province, dealing with an ornery (possibly antiwar) opposition party and doing his best to ignore wretched poll numbers, a hostile media and whacko Code Pink demonstrators (not to mention his quondam allies on the Moveon-Kos end of his party who by now would be calling for his impeachment).
Ignoring the fact that invading Iraq was a retarded thing to do in the first place, it's remarkable that Simon thinks that Gore would have bungled a bad idea exactly as badly as Bush managed to do. A mistake need not be a horrible fuckup, you know: it could be merely a dreadful fuckup. What Simon is really saying is, in the best of all possible worlds, he'd still be no dumber than he is already, believe it or not.
So Gore is perhaps a lucky guy for losing. He gets to fly around – on a private jet or not – bathing in the adulation of the international masses with a Nobel Prize in the offing, while his opponent gets to endure “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” History plays its tricks.
"Fuck You" -- that's from Titus Andronicus. Go look it up. Also, the Earth Prime Gore seems to have shitty poll numbers but also Universal Love. Maybe this is a continuity issue that could be resolved in Earth-W someplace...?
But my intention here is not to bash Gore - I have done that before on aesthetic grounds. My intention is to illustrate what may be painfully obvious: we have very little idea how the political candidates are going to behave “under fire.”
In the last election we had a guy who, while imperfect, really was under fire, in the literal sense of being shot at, and another who weaseled out of having to undergo such a test. Just saying. That's not even controversial, you know.
In fact, we have little idea what anyone is going to do about anything.
Oh, I dunno. You, for instance, are predictable to the point of debilitating tedium.
I won’t be betting that way at the voting booth, but the most determinedly “left wing” of the major Democratic candidates, John Edwards, could end up being the one to take it most firmly to the Islamofascists, just the way he took it to the medical community. After all, Edwards was the most “right wing” of the leading Dems back in ‘O4. He’s made a miraculous switcheroo, most likely motivated by the positions of his opponents.
So it goes – and that’s my point. When listening to what today’s candidates are saying - whether about Iraq or anything else – ignore James Carville’s famous words “It’s the economy, stupid!” They’re so 1992. Remember these words. They’re good for 1002, 2002 and probably 10002….
It’s the power, stupid.
It's the "quotation marks," "asshole."