Terry Cowgill

Cajun Rage

There’s a wise maxim in politics (called it Cowgill’s Rule) that if you have to use 18 column inches in The Washington Post explaining a foolish comment, then you’ve only dug yourself a deeper hole. Sometimes discretion is the better part of stupidity.

Such is the case with poor James Carville, whose affinity for loyalty is almost legendary. In a turkey of an op-ed today, the otherwise brilliant Carville lapsed into a fit of idiocy by essentially saying he was justified in comparing Bill Richardson to Judas because Bill Clinton had made Richardson what he is today.

Leaving aside the deep insult to Richardson, Carville’s comments are a vivid illustration of what so many of us don’t like about the Clintons and the people around them. They have a sense of entitlement that takes your breath away.

Sure, Richardson might owe Bill a favor or two for giving him a job in the Clinton administration, but why does he owe Hillary anything? I thought Hillary has made it clear that she’s the candidate this time around, not her husband.

Besides, isn’t the left always criticizing GWB and his ilk for prizing loyalty over competence? I guess it’s a matter of whose turkey is being gored.

Under Fire, Pants On Fire!

Warning: Don’t watch this if you’re feeling sorry for Hillary. Do watch it if you want a good laugh.

If A Tree Falls …

A few notes from the campaign trail (as viewed from Lakeville):

Could the Democratic nominating process get any closer? Rasmussen reports that 22% want Hillary to withdraw, while … 22% want Obama to get out.

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Hey, if a tree falls in the forest … What I don’t get is that, for all his whining about corporate America, his advocacy for a Canadian-style healthcare system and his endorsement of the Green Party’s presidential nominee, why on earth is Mike Gravel becoming a Libertarian? Above all, them libs believe in free markets.

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MoDo thinks Hillary is now angling to be veep:

One Hillary pal said she wouldn’t want to go back to a Senate full of lawmakers who’d abandoned her for Obama … Maybe The Terminator is thinking: if she could just get her pump in the door. Dick Cheney, after all, was able to run the White House and the world from the vice president’s residence …

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While MoDo speculates, the sleazy, make-my-skin-crawl Dick Morris actually goes to the trouble of cataloging all of Hillary’s lies and presumed lies. That’s quite a list of fibs, Dick. Now maybe you could show us yours.

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If Hillary faces McCain, I think we already have a pretty good idea of how they will attempt to define each other: Hillary is a flip-flopping lefty and a McCain presidency would simply be a third term for GWB. But this piece in today’s WaPo gives you a pretty good preview of the Republican line of attack against Obama in the fall. I’ve got one bit of advice for Obama: Don’t get in any tanks!

Update: And this is how Obama will hit back, But if he does, it will only strengthen the GOP line of attack in the fall.

Power Couple?

Remember this guy? He’s Akhil Reed Amar, the constitutional law professor at Yale who has visited Salisbury and spoken not once — but twice. He electrified crowds at the Salisbury Forum with his combination of high energy, eloquence and scholarship.

Since I am so good at predictions now, you should know that after seeing him speak in our fair town, I predicted Amar will be a SCOTUS appointee in a Hillary administration.

Now he’s written a piece in Slate proposing a solution to the Hillary-Obama rancor that will have some Democrats drooling: power sharing. Let them run as a team — a tag-team, if you will — with one serving as prez and the other as VP, then pulling a switcheroo after three years.

The constitution would permit the process to be repeated three times, thus allowing for 16 years of the dream team and putting an immediate end to the current rancor (if the agreement is approved by both parties soon).

It’s an intriguing idea — albeit an improbable one. But if Hillary and Obama took his advice, I’d say Amar has a lock on replacing the 87-year-old Justice Stevens.

A Currier & Ives World

It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting here in a ski lodge in the Adirondacks waiting for my son to burn off some steam and I ran across a glitzy publication while rummaging around my tote bag. Arriving in my mailbox on Friday, it bills itself as “the premier publication for the people of Northwestern Connecticut.”

To be sure, there are some nice features by some experienced and accomplished writers. And I am very impressed by the amount of advertising the magazine’s ad reps were able to sell. This is a slick publication printed in four-color graphics on glossy coated paper. It’s full of trendy features on gardens, dinner parties and horses. In a word, it is everything Litchfield County is not — or everything I hope it won’t turn into.

Continue reading A Currier & Ives World…

From A Gunless Gun Nut …

I think as a rule talk radio leaves much to be desired. Too often there is an overemphasis on shouting and preening at the expense of meaningful discourse.

But last night as the March winds threatened to pick my house up and throw it — Dorothy-style — to a distant land, I listened to a Hugh Hewitt podcast on SCOTUS’s recent oral arguments on the 2nd Amendment and the extent to which it does or does not entitle us to own guns. The case is really a test of D.C.’s handgun ban. Click here to listen and here for the transcript.

I think I can safely say it is the best half hour of radio I’ve ever heard. There were audio snippets of Kennedy, Scalia, Stephens and Souter battling it out, each followed by analysis and advocacy from two distinguished law school deans (Erwin Chemerinsky and John Eastman) elaborating succinctly and in layman’s terms.

To top it off, in addition to being a skilled radio host, Hewitt teaches constitutional law and continues to be a practicing attorney. If you’re interested in the Constitution, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Continue reading From A Gunless Gun Nut ……

Stuff White People Like

More race-related “stuff.”

Drudge had a link up today on a Houston Chronicle piece about this blog. Parts of Stuff White People Like are LOL funny, but some of it amounts to groping for a laugh.

I guess what I’m wondering is why the provocative title? The blog really makes fun of the cultural and social milieu of the upper middle class — not really at Caucasians in general.

As a friend of mine pointed out, Stuff White People Like is really the Official Preppy Handbook for the new millennium. As a graduate of an old stuffy boarding school, I found much of the satirical Preppy Handbook rang true. As someone who is white and intimately familiar with the upper middle class, I can say the same about Stuff White People Like.

Warning: if you are part of the PC crowd, drive an Audi and fancy yourself extremely open-minded and tolerant, you might find Stuff White People Like highly offensive.

Another Speech

The editorial pages of the major papers are falling all over themselves in praise of Obama’s speech about race. I’ve only viewed bits and pieces, but I, too, liked what I saw. Black rage of the kind shouted by Rev. Jeremiah Wright is something white men like me will never fully understand.

Obama is half white and half black — genetically in a perfect place to help heel the wounds of hundreds of years of oppression. But I have a feeling he’s not being honest when he says he’s never been present in Wright’s church during one of those celebrated tirades. If Wright has been Obama’s spiritual mentor for 20 years, then it stretches credulity to think he’s never seen this side of the reverend.

If indeed Obama sat impassively on a pew when Wright sermonized about the US KKK of A, then he will have a big problem going forward. I’m sure there are dozens of journalists looking into it even as I write this. Come to think of it, what Wright said is only a stone’s throw away from what Obama’s wife said a few weeks ago.

As one professor told The Wall Street Journal:

“The more he has to talk about race, the blacker he becomes in the public imagination.”

I’m afraid this could turn out to be less about race than about honesty.

Trashing Dear Torrington: The Sequel

Update 7 a.m. Tuesday: This morning I discovered a correction The Courant made after Altman’s review. I’ve had to write corrections, too. But nothing as tortured as this. Wow, they must have gotten a lot of heat from restaurant management.

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The Torrington restaurant scene has been trashed again — and by the same author.

Regular readers may recall that I wrote a post about a year ago on a Hartford Courant restaurant critic’s unkind review of The Venetian. In a scathing piece, Courant writer Elissa Altman spent seven paragraphs complaining about poor Torrington before she climbed down from Mt. Olympus and got around to disparaging the Venetian’s food.

A source who lives in Torrington (not 22-year-old Mayor Ryan Bingham, at right) tipped me off to another Altman review — this time of a new upscale place called Prime Steakhouse. Again, it was an ugly and mean-spirited review that prompted boatloads of complaints. And there were some errors of fact requiring a correction or two.

But the astonish thing is that a couple of weeks ago The Courant pulled the review from its website, apparently without explanation — until today, that is, when reader representative Karen Hunter wrote a column attempting (unsuccessfully, I think ) to set the record straight.

[Aside: The cached version of the Prime review is still available through Google. Click here to see it. There is also a lively discussion of the issue on the Chowhound blog.]

I am still confused after reading Hunter’s explanation. It looks like the editor in charge of vetting the review wouldn’t say much to her own paper’s ombudsman. But a reader asked the question that was on everyone’s minds:

Continue reading Trashing Dear Torrington: The Sequel…

A Hooker Is A Hooker …

I saw this question raised a couple of days ago in a blog about Spitzer, but (for the life of me) I can’t remember where, so I will throw it out here for discussion:

Why is it legal to pay someone to have sex in front of a camera (i.e. the pornography industry) but illegal to pay that same person to have sex with you in the privacy of a hotel room? No rationalizations, please …