At first I felt sorry for her. Confused and helpless, Ashlee Simpson had just been exposed to millions of SNL viewers as a lip-synching poser. To make matters worse, instead of immediately walking off stage, she tortured the audience with a bizarre jig dance. It was excruciating. Get off the stage girl! Don’t come back! But after SNL returned from the unplanned commercial break, our Ashlee had the nerve to blame the snafu on the band: “I’m sorry! My band started playing the wrong song!” Can you hear the clock, Ashlee? Tick….tick…tick…
October 25th, 2004
My friend Phil is like a lot of people I know: he loves to play Texas Hold ‘Em. But unlike everyone else, he doesn’t seem to lose. In fact, just this past weekend Phil beat 440 people in an online Hold ‘Em tourney to win $11,000. Phil took a few minutes to answer some questions about a phenomenon that shows no signs of slowing… Continue reading…
October 24th, 2004
David Brooks has most succinctly boiled down the debate, I think. Remove style, eloquence, and off-camera body language, and you basically have two ways to see the world. Like a “manager or engineer,” Kerry is results-oriented. He is mostly focused on the details and the process. I?m not sure he?s “coldly secular,” but undoubtedly the thrust of Kerry?s arguments were rooted in pragmatism and reason. If a company is floundering, the board or senior management must develop a plan to fix the problems. This doesn’t necessarily mean it must change its business principles, however. In fact, often struggling companies return to their core values ?”This is what we do best, this is what we?re good at, and we must re-commit to our founder?s vision for the company.” A smart business would never continue down the wrong path just because it was “certain” about that path’s viability in an earlier era. Any veteran dot-com around today can attest to this fact. Kerry successfully employed this formulation when he said, “It’s one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong. It’s another to be certain and be right, or to be certain and be moving in the right direction, or be certain about a principle and then learn new facts and take those new facts and put them to use in order to change and get your policy right.” But Kerry?s big problem is that while he is learning new facts and changing policy, average Americans don’t detect consistent, guiding principles.
Meanwhile, Bush is almost a character and values fetishist. While Kerry?s “heart went out” to Florida?s hurricane victims, Bush one-upped him by saying, “Our prayers are with the people of this great state.” His classic black-and-white worldview was on full display: “if you harbor a terrorist, you’re equally as guilty as the terrorist.” You could sense that he just wanted to look at the camera, and say, “OK screw it. This debate business is a waste of my time. Here?s the deal. If you want to be safer, stick with me. If you think terrorists are evil, stick with me. If you don?t want to be a slave to the UN, stick with me. Otherwise, Frenchy over there is your man.” Strong, resolute, steadfast. Just not all that concerned with reality.
But what if Lincoln, Churchill, or Martin Luther King were only guided by a strict adherence to pragmatism? Would there have been an Emancipation Proclamation? How much longer would it have taken for civil rights reforms to change hearts and policies? Isn’t it sometimes worth abandoning reason when it comes to fighting against injustice and tyranny and fighting for freedom and liberty? But while it is debatable whether freedom is really on the march in Iraq, as George Will pointed out, it is certainly on the retreat in Russia. And the best intentions won’t change this fact.
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October 4th, 2004
You remember Mark Twain said, ‘He looks like a contented Christian with four aces.’ I mean he was just sitting there like, ‘I’m on top of the world.’ 
