Does anyone embody the smug arrogant blundering of the Bush years more perfectly than Bill Kristol? When he was given a column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, The Grumpy’s eyeballs nearly exploded. The Grumpy cursed Bill Keller’s name a year ago, but now he sees the deep wisdom in that appointment.
With W. about to jump into the chipper of history, The Grumpy turns to Kristol’s column each Monday with glee, eager for a fresh steaming pile of the fatuous ignorance from which we will soon be liberated. How will we remember the mindset behind the disastrous course of the last eight years unless we keep couple of those knuckleheads around to remind us how it all went down? And it is critical that we remember. Kristol provides a useful exhibit.
Kristol will also continue to be a positive force for the destruction of the Republican Party’s fortunes for as long as they let him hang around. He was an early and instrumental backer of that brilliant political phenomenon, Sarah Palin. Kristol bragged about his influence in promoting her and when Palin bombed, Kristol hectored the McCain campaign for trying to muzzle Palin and contain the damage. We can only pray that Kristol remains close to the inner circles of Republican Party decision making for years to come.
So on Monday (12-2-08) Kristol used his Op-Ed space to lobby for war between India and Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai atrocities. He ridiculed Professor Martha Nussbaum and former Republican Congressman Jim Leach for counseling India to avoid a violent nationalist response to the terrorist atrocities in Mumbai.
Having learned nothing from the last eight years, Kristol continues to draw the most simpleminded straight line from “patriotism” to “nationalism” to “fighting the terrorist enemy.” Somehow it never occurs to Kristol that “thinking” should somehow get a wedge in there somewhere. In the face of mindless terrorist violence, he apparently believes that a patriot’s first duty is to lose his mind.
Hey, it worked for Dick and George.
Kristol may still get his way. The governments of India and Pakistan are struggling mightily to resist the slide toward war. Condaleeza Rice is jetting about trying to get the two governments to cooperate against the terrorists responsible for the attacks. But in the streets of Mumbai and Lahore the mobs on both sides of this potential conflagration are taking up Kristol’s challenge and calling for blood and vengeance. The Grumpy assumes that these crazed nationalists do not get home delivery of The Times but if they did, Kristol would be required reading.
Did any of Kristol’s editors think to protect him from himself? Can’t they delegate some craggy faced old timer, some broken down guy in a fedora and suspenders with a nasty cigar, who could take young Bill into the corner office and try to explain it to him? “You see Bill, in India they have Hindus and Muslims, you know, like Osama. You see they hate each other a lot. They used slaughter each other by the millions. They both think they should run the country so when you say they should crank up the nationalism you’re really encouraging a civil war. You can understand that, right? You don’t really want to do that Bill, do you?”
Has Kristol himself ever been involved in anything more violent than an argument over or a squash court reservation at The Harvard Club? What youthful inadequacies does his belligerence mask? Should this prissy milk toast be allowed to encourage the use of state violence from the pages of our most important newspaper? Maybe he should.
The Times has apparently decided to let Kristol embarrass himself on a weekly basis for as long as he likes. Kristol represents the media equivalent of his darling Governor Palin, a suppurating intellectual wound that will bring nothing but calamity to his own side.
Still, The Grumpy dreams of tuning in to Fox News some Sunday when Juan Williams finally loses it, puts Kristol in a headlock and gives him a really good vigorous noogy.
It will happen just after Kristol proudly completes one of his well-rehearsed quips. Kristol will lean back slightly, flare his delicate nostrils, and smile that twisted little half smile. He’ll squint impishly and arch his eyebrows in that inimitable wry manner. As he chuckles softly he'll jiggle his head ever so slightly as if taunt, don’t you wish you could be as wonderful as me? Then Juan will go for him. Chris Wallace and the rest will have to wrestle them apart. It will make a glorious piece of television.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
New Words for a New World
One of our favorite curmudgeons, William Safire, chose frugalista for his favorite new word of 2008 (NYT Sunday Magazine 11-23-08). A frugalista is a penny-pinching fashionista, who swaps and trades for designer clothes rather than buying them. There is a pleasant shade of gentle ridicule in the term, a suggestion that the frugalista devotes a silly revolutionary zeal to her practice.
Safire chose frugalista from a list of the best new words of 2008, proposed by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Safire rejected The NOAD’s winner new word hypermiling, which describes driving an automobile with the minimum use of gasoline. Safire found hypermiling and its synonym ecoDriving (A favorite word of California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger.) too "news-specific", as if global warming and the energy crisis were ephemeral issues, like the season’s hemlines.
The Grumpy loves the new word frenemy, used recently to describe the special love-loathe relationship between Barack and Hillary. This word has legs and is not at all trendy or newsy. It describes a classic political pas-de-deux in which you stab your esteemed friend gently through the ribs while smiling in his or her face.
Big Bill will no doubt correct me if frenemy was not coined in 2008. Perhaps recent research will indicate that it was first used by Samuel Johnson to describe that pesky Boswell fellow, but was lost to lexicographical history when a part time waiter at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese mistook the great man’s scrawl for a snuff stained rag and threw it in the fire.
All this neologizing got The Grumpy cranked up and thinking about some new words that could be useful in the new year.
The Grumpy liked frugalista and plans to use it a lot, but felt we needed a more earnest less ironic appellation for someone dealing bravely with straightended circumstances. The Grumpy tried out frugalnaut on some of his few friends but was not met with applause. Thriftanaut smacks of great heroic adventures in moderation and making-do, and may be applied especially to cheapskate travelers.
Safire will surely enjoy misercrat, a word to describe and poke fun at a familiar brand of puritanical liberal who thinks we can save the world if we all just ride bicycles and save string.
In a New York Times editorial of 11/23/08 (Yes, The Grumpy has to broaden his reading.), we learned that some Bush administration zealots plan to go feral inside the Obama administration, converting themselves from political appointees into permanent civil service moles. These burrowers, as the Times calls them, will bury themselves deep inside the vast federal system intent on sabotaging the new administration and its policies from within. May we improve on this neologism in progress and refer to these dead enders as burrowcrats and suggest that they form an insidious burrowacracy? The Grumpy needs your blessing Bill.
Some have suggested that burrowcrats be known simply as Brownies in honor of the infamously incompetent FEMA director, in the same way that London’s Bobbies took their moniker from Prime Minister Robert Peel.
The Grumpy does not yet have a satisfying word to describe the effort to dig out the burrowcrats. Deburrowcratification somehow doesn’t cut it.
Bush-hogging already exists and does not have the correct connotation of digging out and up rooting the pesky varmints, although it does make a sly reference to that sweaty bucolic pastime, favored by many recent Republican presidents, of hacking away at the shrubbery while on vacation.
Mole whacking is joyful but packs a disagreeable whiff of futility. The moles in the whack-a-mole carnival game keep popping back up and never get properly whacked, in the preferred wise-guy sense of the word.
DeBushification, an appropriate twist on the deBathification of the boondoggliest (most boondoggled) period of the Iraq War, may be the most ready to wear term for dispatching burrowcrats, but it still needs work. Any suggestions?
The office of the Vice President will certainly require a special regimen of intellectual and constitutional fumigation. Some may speak of the need to deCheneyize the office. Political sophisticates will refer to an era of anti-Addingtoniansim, after David Addington the legal architect of the unitary executive theory and inflato-vice-presidentialism.
Bidenize may be used to describe an act of replacing anything grandiose and dangerously overarching with something solid and regular. When you downsize from a McMasion to a small but comfortable cape they will say you have Bidenized your living arrangements. Any similar swap: Rolls for Chevy, Gucci for Thom McCann, The Ritz for Motel 6; will become an example of Bidenization.
Obamafication will be used by right wing talk show hosts to stick a scary foreign sounding label on the normal practice of replacing incompetents with people who know how to do their jobs.
As Lincoln was The Great Emancipator, so Reagan was the Great Communicator. George H. W. Bush, The Great Lip Reader came before Clinton, The Great Triangulator. Has anyone yet christened George W. Bush The Great Discombobulator?
Perhaps Obama will restore peace and prosperity to our nation and become The Great Combobulator, or should that be Recombobulator? Even Safire can hope that coinage represents change we can believe in.
Safire chose frugalista from a list of the best new words of 2008, proposed by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Safire rejected The NOAD’s winner new word hypermiling, which describes driving an automobile with the minimum use of gasoline. Safire found hypermiling and its synonym ecoDriving (A favorite word of California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger.) too "news-specific", as if global warming and the energy crisis were ephemeral issues, like the season’s hemlines.
The Grumpy loves the new word frenemy, used recently to describe the special love-loathe relationship between Barack and Hillary. This word has legs and is not at all trendy or newsy. It describes a classic political pas-de-deux in which you stab your esteemed friend gently through the ribs while smiling in his or her face.
Big Bill will no doubt correct me if frenemy was not coined in 2008. Perhaps recent research will indicate that it was first used by Samuel Johnson to describe that pesky Boswell fellow, but was lost to lexicographical history when a part time waiter at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese mistook the great man’s scrawl for a snuff stained rag and threw it in the fire.
All this neologizing got The Grumpy cranked up and thinking about some new words that could be useful in the new year.
The Grumpy liked frugalista and plans to use it a lot, but felt we needed a more earnest less ironic appellation for someone dealing bravely with straightended circumstances. The Grumpy tried out frugalnaut on some of his few friends but was not met with applause. Thriftanaut smacks of great heroic adventures in moderation and making-do, and may be applied especially to cheapskate travelers.
Safire will surely enjoy misercrat, a word to describe and poke fun at a familiar brand of puritanical liberal who thinks we can save the world if we all just ride bicycles and save string.
In a New York Times editorial of 11/23/08 (Yes, The Grumpy has to broaden his reading.), we learned that some Bush administration zealots plan to go feral inside the Obama administration, converting themselves from political appointees into permanent civil service moles. These burrowers, as the Times calls them, will bury themselves deep inside the vast federal system intent on sabotaging the new administration and its policies from within. May we improve on this neologism in progress and refer to these dead enders as burrowcrats and suggest that they form an insidious burrowacracy? The Grumpy needs your blessing Bill.
Some have suggested that burrowcrats be known simply as Brownies in honor of the infamously incompetent FEMA director, in the same way that London’s Bobbies took their moniker from Prime Minister Robert Peel.
The Grumpy does not yet have a satisfying word to describe the effort to dig out the burrowcrats. Deburrowcratification somehow doesn’t cut it.
Bush-hogging already exists and does not have the correct connotation of digging out and up rooting the pesky varmints, although it does make a sly reference to that sweaty bucolic pastime, favored by many recent Republican presidents, of hacking away at the shrubbery while on vacation.
Mole whacking is joyful but packs a disagreeable whiff of futility. The moles in the whack-a-mole carnival game keep popping back up and never get properly whacked, in the preferred wise-guy sense of the word.
DeBushification, an appropriate twist on the deBathification of the boondoggliest (most boondoggled) period of the Iraq War, may be the most ready to wear term for dispatching burrowcrats, but it still needs work. Any suggestions?
The office of the Vice President will certainly require a special regimen of intellectual and constitutional fumigation. Some may speak of the need to deCheneyize the office. Political sophisticates will refer to an era of anti-Addingtoniansim, after David Addington the legal architect of the unitary executive theory and inflato-vice-presidentialism.
Bidenize may be used to describe an act of replacing anything grandiose and dangerously overarching with something solid and regular. When you downsize from a McMasion to a small but comfortable cape they will say you have Bidenized your living arrangements. Any similar swap: Rolls for Chevy, Gucci for Thom McCann, The Ritz for Motel 6; will become an example of Bidenization.
Obamafication will be used by right wing talk show hosts to stick a scary foreign sounding label on the normal practice of replacing incompetents with people who know how to do their jobs.
As Lincoln was The Great Emancipator, so Reagan was the Great Communicator. George H. W. Bush, The Great Lip Reader came before Clinton, The Great Triangulator. Has anyone yet christened George W. Bush The Great Discombobulator?
Perhaps Obama will restore peace and prosperity to our nation and become The Great Combobulator, or should that be Recombobulator? Even Safire can hope that coinage represents change we can believe in.
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