His not being a slang fan, I doubt he'd appreciate the "rules!" compliment, but Jay Nordlinger is my favorite writer at National Review. Here's the lead item on today's Impromptus:
It says something great -- certainly distinctive -- about George W. Bush that he has refused to go before the NAACP. Also that he has refused to meet Yasser Arafat. I think the two are related, somehow. Bush is a realist; he is a shunner and exploder of illusions; and he knows that words and gestures have meaning.As I have written too many times to count, the NAACP has become more or less a hate group, all but portraying Bush as the lyncher of James Byrd (to cite just one of the more publicized outrages). Why should the president dignify the group with his presence? You don't have to go before the NAACP to speak to black America. You don't have to truck with them to speak to all America.
As for Arafat . . . well, it must be a shock for the most frequent visitor to the White House during the years 1993-2001 to be kept out of it altogether, from Jan. 20, 2001, to now. Bush is often called a "neocon" and other not-quite-friendly things, but he is supremely realistic, certainly about the Middle East, certainly about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, certainly about Arafat.
Reagan withdrew from UNESCO (in 1984). No one quite realizes how important that was, symbolically and otherwise. I mean, you just couldn't do that. It was impossible. And yet he did -- because UNESCO had wasted billions and become a cesspool of anti-Americanism (and anti-Western nonsense generally).
You can't just not meet with the NAACP, and you can't just not receive Arafat . . . and yet.
Oh, there is a difference in this election, folks. Is there a difference. Anyone who tells you that the parties and their leading men are Tweedledum and Tweedledee is smoking something (and inhaling).
But down deep, Mr. Nordlinger nails the reason: a Reaganesque refusal to "play along" with Kyoto, after it was rejected 95-0 in the Senate, to not meet with Arafat, to not let France keep corruption and depredation alive in Iraq...
One more great one from Nordlinger:
More poison — this time from Donald Trump, the "fired" guy. About the Iraq war, he says, "To lose all of those thousands and thousands of people, on our side and their side . . . I mean, you have Iraqi kids, not only our soldiers, walking around with no legs, no arms, no faces. All for no reason."Uh-huh. One of the reasons: No more mass graves, no more torture chambers, no more "rape rooms," no more children's prisons (really), no more cutting out of tongues for dissent, no more putting men into plastic shredders, feet first, so that the killers could hear more screaming, no more . . .