rsc

For those who don't know, Hendrik Hertzberg is a columnist who frequently writes the lead editorial in the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker. He writes skillfully and passionately about political matters, with a decided progressive slant. It seems to me that he hasn't appeared in quite a while, and I was beginning to wonder if for some reason he and his writing had gone elsewhere, but there he is in the Feb. 2 issue. A couple of excerpts, the first of which is the opening sentence:

George W. Bush says he wants to go to Mars -- a motion that many of his fellow-citizens would heartilysecond -- but he probably doesn't mean it.

Later on:

The rest of Bush's proposals were either ruinously expensive, socially poisonous non-starters (such as privatizing Social Security) or cheap cuts of wormy red meat for the conservative and evangelical base. Of the latter the cheapest was an exhortation to professional athletes to quite taking steroids, the wormiest a threat to deface the Constitution with anti-gay graffiti.

I'd love to see that last phrase get into the general public discourse on the topic.