Campaigning in the Land o' Nice

November 5, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Divorce-Court Politics
By CHARLES BAXTER

Minneapolis

WATCHING a recent debate for Minnesota’s vacant Senate seat, a friend of mine remarked, “I hadn’t expected the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But I was hoping for something better than ‘Divorce Court.’ ”

In the debates, the Democratic candidate, Amy Klobuchar, generally discusses the issues, and her opponent, Mark Kennedy, generally attacks Ms. Klobuchar, sounding like an outraged husband. In one such exchange, when the topic turned to the war in Iraq, Ms. Klobuchar advocated a change of course; in response, Mr. Kennedy attacked Ms. Klobuchar, a district attorney, for the rising crime rate in Minneapolis. In the divorce-court politics of nondifferentiated anger, any attack will do.

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Throw the ... bums out

Op-Ed Columnist
Throw the Truthiness Bums Out
By FRANK RICH

EACH voter will have a favorite moment from the fabulous midterms of 2006. Forced to pick my own, I’d go for Lynne Cheney’s pre-Halloween slapdown of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. It’s not in every political campaign that you get to watch the wife of the vice president of the United States slug it out about lesbian sex while promoting a children’s book titled “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America.”

The pretext for this improbable dust-up was a last-ditch strategy by the flailing incumbent Republican senator of Virginia, George Allen. Desperate to resuscitate his campaign, Senator Allen attacked his opponent, Jim Webb, for writing sexually explicit passages in his acclaimed novels about the Vietnam War. Mr. Webb fought back by pointing out, among other Republican hypocrisies, Mrs. Cheney’s authorship of an out-of-print 1981 novel, “Sisters,” with steamy sexual interludes suitable for “The L Word.”

When Mr. Blitzer brought up “Sisters” on live television, Mrs. Cheney went ballistic, calling Mr. Webb a liar. The exchange would have been a TiVo keeper had only the CNN anchor called Mrs. Cheney out by reading aloud just one of the many “Sisters” passages floating around the Internet: “The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.” But you can’t have everything. More

Word of the day: Mondegreen

I’m too embarrassed to ask the lexicographers if they have a favorite word. They get that a lot. Peter Gilliver tells me his anyway: twiffler. A twiffler, in case you didn’t know, is a plate intermediate in size between a dinner plate and a bread plate. “I love it because it fills a gap,” Gilliver says. “I also love it because of its etymology. It comes from Dutch, like a lot of ceramics vocabulary. Twijfelaar means something intermediate in size, and it comes from twijfelen, which means to be unsure. It’s a plate that can’t make up its mind!”

Fiona McPherson gives me mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misheard lyric, as in, “Lead on, O kinky turtle.” It is named after Lady Mondegreen. There was no Lady Mondegreen. The lines of a ballad, “They hae slain the Earl of Murray,/And laid him on the green” are misheard as “They have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.”

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TV Politic Shows

Dinosaurs and demagogs... Pretty uniformly bad from my take. Liz Dole?

Shocked, I'm just shocked... well, OK, not really

"The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life," he said. More

Another closeted homosexual slut in Mr. Bush's internal circle... hmm, let me think about this... He wuz a cheerleader and a fly boy. I've heard they're not always bottoms like Marines...

Attic

Both Thong and I wuz crawling around in the attic running wires from the amplifier to the back wall. I drilled down, which seemed to take forever and fed the wires down. I put trash bags over the insulation and crawled along in the wiring. It was cleaner than I'd imagined. No allergies got triggered, but I'd not call it fun. We put up the back speakers afterwards. Thong went up because he couldn't fish the wires out of the hole we cut, but I put the hanger further in, twirled it a few times and pulled them both out. The outlet's in, the speakers are up, and there's no wire running across the ceiling. I'm happy, even if it did take too long.