Wednesday, July 11, 2007

"I Bet You're A Big Lee Marvin Fan, Aren't You?"

My new writing hero is Charles P. Pierce, who in his portrait of John Edwards in the August issue of Esquire fires of these tasty cheap shots:

1) Mike Huckabee, a greasy Rotarian gasbag from Arkansas ...

2) The imporant thing to remember is that toughness is a semiotic dumb show now. In the same debate in which Mick Huckabee flexed for the camera, John McCain pointed out that in his experience, which is considerable, torture doesn't work. On this, he was disputed by a former mayor of New York, who was once tortured by the thought that his second wife would not vacate the mayoral digs in favor of his second mistress, and the former governor of Massachusetts, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people were getting married. Toughness was now a performance skill in a cowardly country taught to fear the best things about itself.

3) George H. W. Bush flew fighter planes when he was a teenager, and couldn't overcome the "wimp factor" against Ronald Reagan, whose primary combat experience was battling his way to the bar at the Brown Derby.