Saturday, September 11, 2004

Hizzoners During this evening's CBS broadcast of the U.S. Open women's championship match, the camera picked out two New York mayors, current and former, seated together, as anchorman Dick Enberg described: "Here's Mayors Bloomberg and Dinkins, looking on tonight . . . dapper indeed." Rudy Giuliani wasn't among them.  He wouldn't be caught dead sandwiched between his successor and his predecessor; he doesn't like to share the limelight.  If the Yankees were in town, he would have been there.  As it turned out, he was a guest on the Larry King show -- and the conversation was about terrorism, not tennis. Nobody has ever referred to Rudy as "dapper indeed."  He'd probably take it as an insult.  David Dinkins on the other hand, is well known for his sartorial splendor. During Dinkins' successful 1989 mayoral campaign against Giuliani, Jackie Mason paid him the dubious compliment of calling him "a fancy schvartze in a bad suit."  Mason didn't say so at the time, but he might have felt emboldened to utter this description of the African-American Dinkins by Jessie Jackson's notorious 1984 "Hymietown" remark. But now that the third anniversary of 9/11 is here, the loose cannons have gone silent, everyone has buried the hatchet, and we've all come together to grieve and commemorate this somber event. By tomorrow, the presidential campaign will be back in full swing and everybody will be at each other's throats again, in a glorious orgy of lying, cheating and character assassination.  10:19:34 PM

Patriot Games Once again this year, Bush has declared 9/11 to be Patriot Day.  If you're not a Bush supporter, you're not a patriot, you're a terrorist.  It's as simple as that.  This is called moral clarity. In spite of that, the Patriot Day designation seems no more likely to become common currency than Bush's unsuccessful effort a few years ago to replace the term "suicide bomber" with "homicide bomber." When it comes to coining a phrase, Bush is no Tom Wolfe, but let's give credit where it's due.  He'll go down in linguistic history for his many grammatical innovations like "Is our children learning?" along with his precise, plain-spoken descriptions such as "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities". So far, the most potent WMDs used on U.S. soil have been box cutters.  This suggests an exit strategy for the U.S. military in Iraq: Withdraw the troops and re-deploy them in the aisles of Staples, Office Depot and Office Max. 9:15:54 AM