Looking Out for Jews, Gerbils, Jesse Jackson & Louisiville, KY
Kenneth Blake, Mars Hill, NC
Point one: Oh, come on. Caldwell lives in Washington, DC, for God's sake: a lifeless, boring, one-industry town. Geographical elitism coming from him is practically laughable.
Point two: You can't group Kentucky cities together under the umbrella heading of "podunk." Okay, I give you Paducah. Half of my family lives there. It is a podunk town. And Lexington: well, it's way too conservative?and not in the trendy neocon libertarian way?for my tastes, even though it does have the most successful college basketball team in history.
But Louisville...there's a town. We've got real bourbon, cheap cigarettes, a huge theater festival, well-known restaurants, a low cost of living and more parkland per capita than any other city in the country. Louisville has a blues scene, a hipster emo hardcore scene, and a bunch of working-class bars where no one rattles on endlessly about their agent.
Point three: I moved from New York this summer?after a long stint as an intern at New York Press?back to Louisville. Petrified of New York City? Not exactly. In fact, I am less scared of crime in New York than anywhere else.
But I know how much New Yorkers and other über-urban types love to pick on the less cultured of us, we who choose to have a backyard (with trees) instead of using our high rent to feel superior. And for all their talk about the "podunk"-ness of Louisville or Nashville or Minneapolis, I think these statements originate from a fear that if they moved from the city, they'd actually like it.
Whitney Joiner, Louisville
Lenin created the modern totalitarian state. He was the first to organize a centralized, one-party government kept in power by hordes of domestic informers and secret police. His gulags were the prototypes for Hitler's concentration camps, Mao's Laogai, the Khmer Rouge's "re-education camps" and Castro's unnamed prisons. His purges of the opposition and the subsequent use of mass media to spread the justifications for them and indoctrinate the masses were all the tutelage that Stalin needed for his purges and Mao for his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. They provided inspiration for the assorted mass murders of Pol Pot, Hitler (Goebbels must have studied communist propaganda techniques when he formulated his own) and the rest of the world's ideologically motivated tyrants, both petty and grand. Ultimately, the final body count is Lenin's.
His economic model of communism was copied and imposed throughout the world and kept in place despite mountains of evidence (often corpses) that proved its repeated failure, but so many otherwise intelligent people were seduced that they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. That's influence.
Hitler was a piker by comparison. Roosevelt's New Deal was a pale imitation of Lenin's economic policies. Churchill was defined by his opposition to totalitarianism. He was able to stand alone against the Nazis, but he couldn't stop the communist occupation of Eastern Europe. Babe Ruth was the prototype of the superstar athlete, but celebrity like his was a minor accomplishment compared to the subjugation of one third of the world. Caesar and Alexander would have been envious. The most influential man of our century, and its greatest monster, should have graced Time's cover.
Also: Something had been nagging me about Hillary's non-campaign, and that's the house expenditure. Both Clintons are obsessed with money, and she's the greedier of the two. The woman whose deducted two dollars per for donating Bill's skivvies to Goodwill and who let herself be the conduit for $100,000 in bribes laundered through the cattle futures market is not going to casually toss away $1.7 million on a house that has no value to her except as campaign prop. Unless...
First, assuming that they've closed on the property, which I don't recall seeing anywhere in the news, they can always resell it with only a minimal loss, as long as they do it quickly, if that's her intent. Meanwhile, Hillary's fundraising continues unabated, and she gets to keep the money if she doesn't run. If, as you guessed, it's about $10 million, then here's how it plays out: She makes enough to cover the purchase, making it her house free and clear. After she dumps Bill, it gives her a nice place to live while she passes her resume around to the various New York City megafirms and does the lecture circuit of colleges and foundations in the Northeast corridor. Since Bill's most likely post-2000 plan involves taking a job as legal counsel to one of the major studios in Hollywood, this puts them on opposite coasts, which just might be enough distance for the two of them, especially after the nasty, Jerry Springeresque spectacle of their impending divorce.
Ultimately, Hillary's goal is twofold in this non-campaign. She's going to milk the Democratic faithful to the tune of the $10 million or so that she's raised thus far and however much more she can get between now and her tearful announcement that she cannot run because of her duties as First Lady. (Of course, if there's a massive shift in her poll numbers, or if Giuliani is caught screwing a goat on the steps of City Hall, she might go for it after all, but only if she thinks that it's a lock, as a Senate seat would perpetuate the payday.) But she'll make that decision when the last polls are taken prior to the filing deadline. If she tosses a couple of million at the DNC as a soft-money contribution (to assuage the people who thought that they were contributing to a Senate campaign and not her retirement fund) and pays off the house outright, she walks away with a minimum of $6 million.
Not a bad take for not running for Senate.
Mike Harris, Los Angeles
E. Albertine, Queens
Joan, enter at your own risk.
James Green, Manhattan
Grabbing Caldwell and Cockburn was an incredibly smart move, and very fortunate for you guys. New York Press is consistently the liveliest political read in the city.
Chris DeFrancesco, Manhattan
Heskel M. Haddad MD, Manhattan