About Harper Lee… Saturday, Jul 11 2015 

Ethics and Literature victorgold 3:15 pm

…a final word. Her “new” novel titled “Go Set a Watchman” is out, and it’s a good title because we need one set to protect the old and out-of-it from financial predators. The book, a manuscript rejected for publication more than half a century ago, depicts Atticus Finch as a racist SOB. Does anyone seriously think that Harper Lee, of sound mind, would have agreed to publish a book that destroys an icon that made “Mockingbird” great and established her worldwide reputation?

Soundbite to remember (with apologies to P.T. Barnum)

There’s a bloodsucker born every minute.

 

Where There’s a Will…. Friday, Jul 3 2015 

Politics , victorgold 11:22 am

What follows is perhaps better suited to a column by a media critic, but since George Will seems beyond their reach…

This is the second presidential election in which Will’s wife is involved as an employee of a particular candidate; which, as Richard Nixon would say, is her perfect right. However….

In his column of July 2, the Washington Post columnist excoriated Ted Cruz for his stand on a constitutional issue, writing that “some candidates are becoming too unhinged to be plausible as conservative presidents” – a thrust obviously calculated to draw conservative primary voters away from Cruz to some other candidate; after which came the line: “Disclosure: This columnist’s wife, Mari Will, works for Scott Walker.”

Oh. I guess that makes whatever Will writes about other candidates in the next sixteen months perfectly acceptable; at least as far as the Post’s editorial ethicists are concerned. Presumably the rest of us are expected to believe – given “disclosure” and all – that George and his wife have separate bank accounts.

Sound bite to remember

“We’re all hustlers. We’re as honest as we can afford to be.”

         –Lenny Bruce

 

Scalia to Fox? Wednesday, Jul 1 2015 

Media and Politics victorgold 7:03 pm

“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egoistic. Of course, the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”

–Justice Antonin Scalia attacking fellow Justice Anthony Kennedy in his dissent in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges.

Paging Roger Ailes! Read the above and the rest of Scalia’s dissenting opinion and tell me if that’s not the perfect tone to fill a spot on Fox’s schedule. Surely, with Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee now off your payroll, there’s an opening for an abrasive Supreme Court justice temperamentally suited to satisfy the red-meat appetite of Fox’s primetime audience.

Like Bill O’Reilly, Antonin Scalia also meets the first requirement of a celebrity arbiter in today’s political environment. Seated at a table with Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Copernicus and Voltaire, he’d still think he was the smartest guy in the room. And more: Scalia also has that special gift of the best in Fox political analysts, the inability to disagree without being disagreeable.

Think of this as well: It’s one thing for an intellectual nincompoop like Palin, who’s never heard of, much less read, the Federalist papers, to mouth the cheap demagogic line that Supreme Court decisions are “undemocratic” because they’re rendered by “unelected lawyers”; but for a bona fide Justice who claims to channel the Original intent of the Founders to make that argument, as Scalia does, is something you’re not going to get out of any washed-up candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Like, say, Scalia’s soulmate in demagogic trash talk, Donald Trump.

Am I getting personal here, arguing ad hominem? Good. It fits the subject. What’s more, as Scalia’s erstwhile hunting partner Dick Cheney once said after insulting a U.S. senator, I feel better for having done it.

Sound bite to remember

“Any man who tells you he starts off each morning with a cold shower will lie about other things.”

         –Dwight Eisenhower, commenting on a news report about his presidential campaign opponent Adlai Stevenson, 1952