Limited, Inc.

Remora The exchange between Annie Applebaum and the always odious Strobe Talbott in Slate is a little treasure trove of Clintonia -- remember that magic time when the White House was inviting crooked Chinese and Indonesian money into the coffers of the Democratic Party, while palling around with the Mafia, uh, I mean government of Boris Yeltsin and his shifty-fingered ilk? Applebaum is less scoriating on this subject than I'd like her to be, but she does put the bite on Strobe's Gray Flannel trousers act. Here's a nice graf: You are arguing, essentially, that in order to destroy something bad (communism), we had to let something less bad (oligarchic noncapitalism) grow in its place. Well, maybe we didn't have much influence over this change anyway (despite the fact that U.S. policy�and U.S. rhetoric�often implied that we did). Yet you are also arguing that it was OK for us to give our tacit approval to this change because we got some political concessions i

Dope A friend tells us: I sent your post about bias in the press to a conservative friend of mine. He responded that Limited Inc was confusing the issue. And that Limited Inc was in the habit of confusing issues, because Limited Inc lacked a certain, necessary depth. Now, there you go: my friend's friend has provided an explanation for a problem that has frankly puzzled us: why isn't Limited Inc exercizing world wide influence and being consulted by the powers of the Earth on a daily basis? More specifically, this has made Limited Inc think about issues qua issues. As in, what are issues, and where do they come from? The traditional political divisions are usually delineated by showing that, on a given array of issues, x will take this position and y will take that position. What Limited Inc is all about, gentle readers, is disputing the given-ness of the issues themselves. Their shape, their texture, their topical constitution, their implementation, their dis

Remora Because LI has spurned the water of life, and is one of those unfortunates who will be processed on the left hand of our Lord transiting to the eternal gnashing of teeth that reportedly awaits our type, one would think that the abuse being hurled at the Catholic Church by a press that is normally servile to religious groups to a point of intellectual abasement that is hard to stomach would warm our hearts. Well, it doesn't. Sunday, I was listening to a NPR interview with Alan Cooperman, who with Lena H. Sun wrote a Sunday article for the Washington Post , Hundreds Of Priests Removed Since '60s: Survey Shows Scope Wider Than Disclosed The intro grafs tell the story: "The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of allegations of child sexual abuse, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, according to a survey of Catholic dioceses across the United States by The Washington Post. The surv

Remora Bias Limited Inc was thinking that the big story today - which is, of course, Britney Spears new CD, and how it compares with the great works of the past -- was something we should get right on. We should jump on this with both feet, Jim. We should make our own preferences -- for Britney's Blue period, and her experiments in dissonance and the atonal register when she was going out with that N Sync guy -- crystal clear. Of course, we were heavily sedated when these and other thoughts raced through our head... Instead, we are going to address a less serious issue -- that of liberal bias in the press and the entertainment industry. Housesitting over the weekend, we finally had a chance to take in the O'Reilly report. The report -- we kid you not -- was a shocking expose of LEFT WING BIAS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY! Roll over Walter Winchell, and tell Estelle Parsons the news... Uh, right, where were we? Oh yes, O'Reilly's shocking scoop. What makes

Dope LI has been crawling out from under our rock and re-connecting with the ten chapters of a crime novel we wrote a couple of years ago. Our inspiration, at the time, was Leonardo Sciascia, the great Italian writer. If you haven't read any of Sciascia's toothpick slim, extremely disorienting novels, let's just say they are not by any means your usual entertainment. Crime, for Sciascia, is the surface unfolding of an event that, correctly interpreted, can represent the matrix of hidden power relationships. Sciascia's investigators require a hermeneutics of governance as the necessary supplement to the labor of deduction. Now, since the former is a rare thing, his investigators have a tendency to fail. In Sciascia's world, the criminal doesn't explain the crime, even if you catch him: the criminal is a merely the last instance of a chain that extends down, down in the dark. Sciascia's detectives are undone through their naive trust in the detective