Observatio

A Numbers Game

Rudy likes to tell of nine-one-one,
The time he didn’t poop his pants and run.
As people and paper fell from the sky,
He was New York City’s go-to guy.

But that was quite a while back,
And since then: no new attack.
Still, Rudy talks a lot of nine-one-one,
Every other word, in fact, a nine or one.

I wonder where he’d be if, on that day,
The Mets had beat the Cubs (or Tampa Bay),
And nothing tragic had undone
Us. Not much talk, for sure, of nine-one-one.

Observatio

I don’t know about you, but if Hillary’s faux weeper the other day did have anything to do with her success in the New Hampshire primary, there is no hope for ‘Murca. Like accused murderers who take a shot at crying on the witness stand but lack actual liquid coming out of their tear ducts, Hillary attempted to “show emotion” over the plight of our country. “I see what’s happening,” she said (I paraphrase), “and we can’t go backwards.” Presumably she meant the assault on the Constitution that the Bush administration has been able to pull off, lo, these last seven years. It does bring a tear to the eye, or should, but she looked and sounded more like someone bemoaning the loss of a favored pet. Her hand plied her cheek and she nodded in Oprahesque fashion as she whimpered.

Please, tell me this was not the moment that put her over the top.

I have to admit, I’m rooting for Edwards to claw himself up out of the political grave, or for Obama to pull back just a tad from the “second-coming” persona the media has applied to him, so a Hillary win in NH was disappointing on its face to me. I’m eager for the end of the Bush/Clinton/Bush era. I want the slate cleaned and the rancid chalk dust of the last twenty years vacuumed out of the crevices.

If it worked, Hillary’s quivering lip drains the last of my hope for reason this election year.

Consternatio

The candidates have resorted to using coded language to reach their bases. Huckabee refers to "vertical thinking," which is apparently a fundamentalist Christian idea meaning to think like God would. Meanwhile, Obama yesterday said, mocking himself, "The time to come has changed."

A slip of the tongue? Or is he reaching out to millions of sex addicts to put him over the top...