Goofus and Gallant
An energized David Letterman is back on his game in late night television. With Worldwide Pants writers back to work under a Guild contract, Dave has been given an opportunity to grab the top ratings spot again at 10:30 central time, as he did on Monday night. He paid his employees through the strike and honored the picket line, even as his competitors-- Leno, Conan, Jon Stewart, and Colbert-- each missed the chance to put their high-profile leverage to good use. It's inaccurate to call these other performers "scabs" as long as they don't write material for their performances or hire replacement writers, but no doubt, their potentially-powerful voices have been muffled. Dave in 2008 has been edgy, witty, and very funny, and were it not for his "Late Show," where else on television would you see a Writers Guild picket sign?Dave has been both a champion of his union, and, it seems, a first-class employer, dating back to the 1980s when he was railing nightly against the corporate "weasels" at General Electric.
Here's Dave's segment with Howard Stern last night. First-class entertainment.
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As the end of the year "prestige" films spread to theaters across the continent, it has become evident that 2007 has been one of the great years in cinema history. It might only be made better if the writers' strike spares us some or all of the tedious televised awards season.
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I guess I was right in my last post. Goose Gossage on steroids Wednesday: "Chances are, I probably would have done it too."
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I might stop locking my door at night knowing that Marion Jones will be locked up for six months.
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I don't buy into this phony debate about whether Hillary Clinton has fallen victim to a sexual double standard over the display of her emotions, though the double standard does exist. The narrative in this case naively plays right into the hands of the Clinton campaign. No being on Earth really doubts that Hillary Clinton has human emotions. The idea is ridiculous even on the surface. But at the same time, Clinton has attempted in the past to be every thing to every person in her career, and it's perfectly reasonable to question whether this always calculating candidate cried crocodile tears the day before the New Hampshire Primary to bolster her faltering get-out-the-vote effort. At the very least, as Maureen Dowd put it this week, "it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing."
Furthermore, as long as Clinton keeps injecting gender into the campaign, I say she's fair game. If my fellow feminists, like Gloria Steinem (in an op-ed piece this week in the NY Times), were really serious about minimizing the misogyny in our political process, they would have dropped Bill Clinton and his wife like sacks of wet cement a decade and a half ago. Hillary has championed the patriarchy time and time again in the Senate with her support for war against Iraq and Iran, and her silence and inaction towards our unholy economic partnership/dependence with/on the Saudi government. "Cheney in a Pantsuit, " as blogger Andrew Sullivan dubbed her, has been out to prove for 8 years that she's got bigger "balls" than anyone else in government, and that the size of her balls can be best measured by the proportionate size of her military hammer. And before her Senate career began (on the back of her husband's marital indiscretions), she was more than happy to occupy her time with the public sliming of her husband's various paramours, who tend towards professional subordinates and members of the economic underclass.
Even as she suggested on Wednesday that "the caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together," Steinem questioned in her piece whether Barack Obama would have the biography of a serious presidential candidate if he had been born the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father, then spending some years as a community organizer and marrying a corporate lawyer, before serving as a state legislator for eight years and in the U.S. Senate for less than one term. My best answer to her inquiry would be yes, provided that the lawyer he married was Bill Clinton.
posted by CM @ 12:43 PM
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