Month: February 2004 (Page 2 of 3)

“Why cook at home when there’s Perkins?”

I’ve been accused repeatedly, especially recently, of being blindly partisan. The conventional wisdom is that I would never criticize anyone on “my side” of the ideological fence.

Well hold onto your hats, because I think Howard Dean has done something extremely wrong.

In an e-mail to me and thousands of other supporters last Thursday, Dean wrote:

“We will get a boost this weekend in Washington, Michigan and Maine, but our true test will be the Wisconsin primary. A win there will carry us to the big states of March 2 and narrow the field to two candidates. Anything less will put us out of this race.”

In the same e-mail they put up one of the Dean fundraising “bats,” and raised more than the $700,000 goal in a single day to pay for ads and more campaigning in Wisconsin. I myself “hit the bat” again because of this e-mail.

And now Dean says he won’t quit the race after Wisconsin, no matter what happens.

This is wrong on so many levels. The worst is, he goes back on an important promise. And integrity and honesty have been Dean’s calling cards all along. But there are other problems: it makes the “bat” seem like a cheap fundraising trick. It sets Dean up for some sort of Perot-like opposition campaign, which can only hurt. It makes it easy for Republicans to laugh at Dean as a Clintonesque language-parsing “depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” Democrat.

All of this sucks, and it’s no one’s fault but Dean’s. If he doesn’t win Wisconsin (and the polls are not smiling on him here), he should get out. I want him to be a force for reform in the party, not a spoiler. He has a chance to make at least some lemonade out of this situation – I hope he still can.

Hell has officially frozen over.

Well not really. O’Reilly sort of apologized, and then blamed George Tenet for crappy intelligence on Iraq WMD. So maybe some Hell households just need space heaters. (thanks to Miss A for the link)

Peggy Noonan has a Wall Street Journal column out where she argues that Democrats do well with talking points (i.e. with extemporaneous talking, discussing issues), while Republicans do well with speeches.

That’s probably true. But all that proves is that Republicans have better speechwriters. Noonan herself wrote for famously bad-with-talking-points Ronald Reagan.

As for me, I don’t think it’s too high a bar for the President of the United States to be able to think on his feet. Or think. People can be taught speechcraft. Thinking is harder.

UPDATE: In related news, I’m fully intending to write a post about Bush’s performance on “Meet the Press” over the weekend, as soon as I can bring myself to watch it again, more critically.
Preview: This guy is the President?

The only proven metehod to enhxance the giorth and lenxght of your pefnis!

My pefnis is fine, thanks.

The Dean campaign, hanging by a thread, is asking people to vote on which ad to run in Wisconsin before the Feb. 17 “do or die” primary.

I personally like the “Max” ad the most, by an order of magnitude. It’s more positive than the other two, it’s a lot more about Dean than it is Bush or Kerry, and it’s also looser and more personal, I think. What do you think?

For some reason I’m continually confronted with the color orange lately. Crate and Barrel sent me a catalog the other day featuring orange things (a juicer, dishtowels, colander, etc.). I turned on “Debbie Travis’ Facelift” and she was painting someone’s kitchen orange. In fact, orange is all over TV ads now. Then this morning, a college student walked across the intersection in front of me wearing a bright orange cap.

Is orange the new something?

It does give me an idea, though. In the unlikely event that I redo my own kitchen, I’d like to have light wood cabinets, dark grey countertops and floor, and coppery glass tile for the backsplash (which is really the only wall space in the kitchen, because it’s so tiny). I would also like to have some of the cabinets with glass fronts, to make the kitchen look bigger. And I was thinking it might be cool to paint the back of those cabinets orange. It would be cheerful and not overpowering, since the room is so small.

Not that this is probably ever going to happen, but I can dream.

Watching Martha Stewart, hosting “From Martha’s Kitchen” from a resort in Jamaica, repeatedly say, “It’s a good ting.”

Caught the last 15 minutes of “Survivor All Stars” tonight, just in time for several lingering shots of Ethan’s torso. If they made every episode a full hour of Ethan running around the island in shorts, I’d watch every minute of the whole series – and buy the DVD. Clearly I’ve got it bad.

Plus, in a burst of good news for Ethan pervs like me, although his tribe lost the immunity challenge for the second week in a row, they decided to kick off 75-year-old Rudy and keep Ethan around for another week. This is a good thing.

I know money is not votes. I know the Dean campaign still has a huge mountain to climb, and right now they’re at the bottom. But in a single day, they raised more than $700,000 to air ads in Wisconsin. That’s spectacular.

If Dean doesn’t win Wisconsin, he himself said he would be out of the race. Considering how badly things are going for Bush these days, I think any of the remaining Dems could beat Bush. So I think it’s time for us to vote for who we think would make the best president. And for me, that’s Dean hands-down.

Go Dean.