Quote of the Day 3

Jonah Lehrer, from his book proposal, A Book About Love:

“Careers fall apart; homes fall down; we give away what we don’t want and sell what we can’t afford.  And yet, if we are lucky, such losses reveal what remains.  When we are stripped of what we wanted, we see what we will always need:  those people who love us, even after the fall.”

In 2012, Lehrer lost his job at The New Yorker for fabricating quotes and plagiarizing (from himself!) and had his book Imagine:  How Creativity Works recalled by the publisher.  It was a stunning plunge for someone who had enormous success as a young man.

 

Newt As “Moldering Lemon”

Great post by Amy Davidson at The New Yorker, “Super Tuesday:  Four Shades of Resentment”:

“Gingrich…was a soft package of sour narcissism, like a moldering lemon with a sunken white fuzzy spot where his head should be. … He turned an isolated win in a losing campaign into an occasion to recite an enemies list.  ‘I hope the analysts in Washington and New York, who spent June and July explaining our campaign was dead, will watch this,’ he said.

“It took several minutes for Gingrich’s railing about wrongs other Republicans had done to him (‘the Reagan negative ad, that is a total lie, O.K.?’) to be joined by his contempt for Obama (‘shallow,’ ‘deliciously incoherent,’ ‘debating him would be just one of those moments where you could almost sell tickets for charity’).”

And more in that vein for all four candidates if you head to thenewyorker.com.  The speeches were all uniformly awful.  Big audience, big wasted opportunity for free media.

Conservatives Really Hate Obama, Not His Foreign Policy

David Remnick rather charitably writes in The New Yorker (“Behind the Curtain”):  “The trouble with so much of the conservative critique of Obama’s foreign policy is that it cares less about outcomes than about the assertion of America’s power and the affirmation of its glory.  … Yet a calculated modesty can augment a nation’s true influence.”

The truth about the conservative critique of Obama’s foreign policy is that it cares less about outcomes than about advancing a false narrative to deny him any credit whatsoever for successes like killing bin Laden and ousting Qaddafi.  These conservatives don’t care as much about whether America wins as they do about making sure President Obama loses.   Obama is fighting our real enemies, while the conservatives are fighting him.

I’m sick to death of their phony patriotism and frustrated that Mr. Remnick didn’t call them on it.