Limited, Inc.

Bollettino One of the most illuminating and melancholic comments we’ve read in the NYT about our system was buried in this story about the potential Bush strategy in a camaign against Kerry. That strategy is utterly predictable (begin on a rabid note, accelerate from there): what attracted us was this ominous quote from the Kerry side: “Another Kerry adviser was more blunt. "This is not the Dukakis campaign," the adviser said. "We're not going to take it. And if they're going to come at us with stuff, whatever that stuff may be, if it goes to a place where the '88 campaign did, then everything is on the table. Everything." Everything that is wrong with the Democrats is in that quotation. “Everything,” presumably, won’t be on the table if the Republicans play nice. Which leads to the question: why? The Democratic party is heading for extinction when, demagraphically, it should be heading for hegemony. That's because it still thinks of itself

Bollettino I talked to D., my best friend, yesterday, and he bitched about the end of this blog. So I told him that I have to spend my time finishing my novel, and he said that he’d been hearing that excuse for 20 years. Well, score one for D. However, I didn’t tell D. that the other reason I ended this blog was that it was slowly and surely driving me crazy. Reading the newspapers closely every day is a sure recipe for a quick trip to the rubber room, if you ask me. And not having to read them in order to comment on … well, anything, has made yours truly feel much lighter. However, there can’t be too much harm in writing a much less concentrated blog. So instead of pulling this thing down, we will do our jumping jacks here occasionally. It can’t do any harm. Today, we read Christopher Hitchens column in Slate about the missing WMD . It made us wonder how long they are going to continue to put up with Hitchens. It is one thing to be a contrarian; it is quite another to