Thursday, September 15, 2005

Roberts rules

Have watched only a few minutes of the Judge Roberts confirmation hearings-- just enough to know one thing I already knew (Joe Biden is an ass) and one thing I hadn't known (Roberts is mopping the floor with these people).

Re: Biden
I guess he didn't get that memo that says if you want to run for President you need to be likeable. What you don't need is to look like a contemptuous, boorish, nasty, rude, unreasonable, wannabe-schoolyard-bully who is more like a delusional little yippy-dog than a genuine pit-bull.

But why should I try to diss Biden when others are doing it so much better?
Hugh Hewitt:

I confess, I am addicted to Slow Joe Biden. If he comes on the tube, I have to stop and stare, like every driver crawling past an overturned semi with ambulances and firetrucks and stretchers everywhere. Biden is quite simply the only cartoon with flesh I have ever seen, a wholly ridiculous fellow, but one who is completely unaware of his own absurdity. When I learned yesterday of his extraordinary record in law school, the picture grew even more complete. Smarmy. Obsequious. Thin-skinned.

Please, please, please run for president Joe.

Schumer is a close second --far, far smarter than Biden, and if anything his superior in ego as well. Schumer is nearly as compelling a small town political dinner theater show as Biden, but Biden is the champ

And nobody beats Jonah Goldberg:

The man loves his voice so much, you'd expect him to be following it around in a grey Buick, in defiance of restraining order, as it walks home from school. He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization's usual imperatives to stop talking.

Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown V. Board of Ed which most people don't understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I'm going to get right to it and besides these aren't the droids you're looking for....

Amen. As Hugh said, Please, please run for President, Joe. Now is the time for all good teeth to come to the aid of their party.

The headline you thought you'd never see:
Peggy Noonan nails the President

You never know which mode of Noonan is going to roll out-- she's as capable of writing with intense emotion (Why They Ran) as she is of wielding the pundit's sledgehammer.

Today, with a little bit of both, she nails President Bush perfectly-- short, sharp analysis of what's ailing his presidency, where he blew it when Katrina blew in, and a hint of where he ought to go from here if he's smart. I would only add to her comment about how the Republican party is torn, that among what's on the table that needs to be addressed is a general recollection of how to fight a war-- more specifically, how to fight this war and in what ways it's unlike other wars, either of history or of Donald Rumsfeld's imagination. The fact that a Bush favorite has fallen over at FEMA is a whole new world for the President of "Loyalty"-- dares one hope that other positions in the administration are no longer assumed to be unassailably secure?

Noonan detects the scent of renewal in the air-- I hope she's right.