There’s just something about a privileged prep-schooler in his twilight years going on in the same fashion he has for his entire dull, witless life that sets the blood aflame.
Besides, I can’t do the whole pretentious, annoying, ersatz intellectual thing every damn day, can I? No, I can’t, because that actually takes a little (very little) bit of fucking brainpower, whereas just bashing on Dionne is like doing pushups or crunches for me.
So he starts out like this: “What happened tonight to the Scott Brown who had endeared himself to a lot of Massachusetts voters by being a nice guy?”
FFS! Really? So that’s what American politics is all about for Dionne: endearing oneself to voters by “being a nice guy.” Well, at least we’re not asking ourselves, “What happened today to the E.J. Dionne who had endeared himself to a lot of dull Washington Post readers and editors by being utterly vacuous?” (And, unfortunately, I’ve heard that smug, spittly voice enough times to hear it even as I’m skimming the utterly useless, smug and spittly Washington Post piece.) Dionne goes on to mention a couple of (possibly, marginally) mean-spirited things that Scott Brown said to Elizabeth “Cherokee Nation” Warren during last night’s senatorial debate in Boston. Arbiter of niceness—E.J. Dionne! What did we do to deserve this?
The question: How insipid does a 60-year-old man who’s spent his entire life going down on the rich and powerful want to be? As mentioned, this is a guy who grew up soft and easy, which makes this approach to life—this “consistency” (see Gunny’s quotes above)—inexcusable. Look, I care more about the consistency of Bill O’Reilly’s bowel movements than who wins in Massachusetts; I just can’t stand E.J. Dionne or a single fucking thing he represents.
Is this ad hominem/ad toolinem? Does it say more about me than it does E.J. Dionne? Uh…maybe…
You know, I just realized that I can honestly claim to have never read a word that E. J. Dionne has ever written. I can almost say that about Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman too, but I have read enough sputteringly quoted excerpts from those two to know why my wider ignorance of them should be blissful.
I suspect it’s like eating Cheetos: it’s not that they’re so bad in themselves, just that once one starts in on them one never gets around to the tabouleh or the strawberries and cream. Or why listening to top 40 radio prevents Beethoven quartets and Tom Waits. You get the idea (which ain’t much of one…)
Montaigne! There’s your answer. Or, if you have to have politics, Grant’s memoirs. They may not seem to have much to do with Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren before you spend an hour reading them, but they sure do afterwards.
Natasha,
Actually it is a fine idea. But…
“Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
The broader context:
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
I thought that the current official, passive aggressive, Democratic line was:
“Scott Brown is a nice guy but….”
In fact I’m sure that I heard Elizabeth Warren say it on NPR today.
Expat, saying that somebody has their good and bad sides isn’t passive aggressive. For instance, I’m a nice guy but I do tend to hold grudges: judicious criticism, see? Not passive aggressive, just balanced. Passive aggressive would be more like if I typed, “Scott Brown wouldn’t know a nice guy if he was getting a blow job from one,” but then graced it with a smiley face.
Scott Brown is probably a nice guy. But he gets the votes for the simple reason that he does the fucking job that he was elected to do. What a novel concept. And has the cojones – although it maybe doesn’t take a lot of them – to stand up to the wingnut faction of the Republican party on issues like abortion rights. Now granted he’s still tucked into deep blue Massachusetts, so isn’t challenged at a national level like a certain Mittens Romney. But should he ever decide to go national, i would hope he’d have the cojones too to stick to his positions (Mittens is as glaring a caveat as one could want), or even smarter, turn Indy.
Damning with faint praise?
Perhaps that isn’t right either.
Regardless “The Scott Brown is a nice guy but….” meme seems to be part of the current attack on him that the Democrats think might work. At least for now.
……and Dionne was just following the script.
Oh, hell. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy. What do I know? (But hey, I’m nothing if not inconsistent.) The “ire of a saint,” I guess. Or just your basic anger and instability.
Went out for a drink and Chinese takeout, Scott Brown’s commercial played no less that 3 times in the hour i was at the bar. total waste of money, it’s not like we can vote for him here or anything.