Where is Metro when you need him? Probably sulking because Blogger won’t let me leave any golden droppings in his comment section.
Stolen from the comments on Gawker:
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Oh, look what’s lying right here on the coffee table, one of my favorite passages by Gore Vidal:
“Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons. It was Acheson– again– who elegantly explained all the lies that he was obliged to tell Congress and the ten-minute-attention-spanned average American: “If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise…Qualification must give way to the simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” Thus were two generations of Americans treated by their overlords until, in the end, at the word “Communism”, there is an orgasmic Pavlovian reflex just as the brain goes dead.”
Gore Vidal, Dreaming War, New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, p.117-118.
Bonus points for the following as well:
- “When she was running for the Senate, Hillary’s psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately — I heard she said, “I remind them of their first wife.”
