Philip Baruth

SLED DOGS AND HEAVYWEIGHTS
The Best of the Best of the Blogs

A Brown Fedora Book

© Copyright 2009 This book may be downloaded, printed and read for personal use only, and only with the author’s name affixed.

To my excellent good friend Jim DeFilippi, may he ever enjoy himself

SLED DOGS AND HEAVYWEIGHTS
The Best of the Best of the Blogs

Forward

Philip Baruth grew up around sled dogs and learned a lot. His writing is packed
with leg-strength, shoulder-power, and an absolute giddy love of what he is doing—the task that he was bred for. Show any sled dog a harness and a trail and he’ll yip with excitement; show Baruth a fraudulent politician or a social cause, and he nearly foams.

His political blog, Vermont Daily Briefing (VDB), is consistently named Best Blog by various periodicals like the Washington Post and reader surveys like those in Seven Days. He somehow finds time to put up daily letter-perfect, pitch-perfect posts—
funny, cutting, insightful, outrageous—as well as being an English professor, Vice-Chair of the University of Vermont English Department, a novelist (The Ex-President, The Brothers Boswell), a school board member, and titular head of the most beautiful family
this side of an orange juice commercial.

Many of his posts concern local politics, but this book is a collection of some of his takes on the Heavyweights of the American political scene—the Ted Kennedys, the Bushes 1 and 2, Clintons him and her, the Obamas, Chaneys and Leibermans of the political world. These selections, taken from over 1500 choices, are near random; Baruth’s level of quality is that consistent.

Some essays are complimentary, nearly adulatory, but there must have been a few attack dogs in his childhood team. When Baruth sniffs out phoniness or duplicity, he attacks with canine ferocity, rarely showing charity while always showing class. Behind that Charlie Brown face of his lies the mind of The Green Hornet.

If you tend to get depressed by the state of American politics, read on. Baruth may be cynical, negative, and partisan, but he’s funny. Bone-marrow-deep funny.

Baruth now embarks on a new stage of his life, a career in politics. It is a career that can only lead to one place, because—as is often said about sled dogs—“If you ain’t the lead dog, the view is always the same.”

Shazam.

—Chet Coww, Torella dei Lombardi, Italy, 2009 ♣♣♣

November 17th, 2008:
A Tale of Two Races

When I was a kid, my family raised Siberian huskies, and we raced them with a
local organization, the Mohawk Valley Sled Dog Club. I started my own short racing career as a basket boy, riding in the basket of my mother’s sled on training days — I was there to keep her company, to turn the dogs at the halfway point, and to untangle them if they were suddenly at one another’s throats.

But by the time I turned twelve, I’d managed to convince my mother that it was time I had a team of my own. Just a five-dog team, nothing elaborate. And my gang were the misfits, the dogs too slow or too old to make my parents’ teams.

But they were mine, and I trained with them all through the fall using a big metal rig with wheels to run them up and down our little country road. Come winter, the night before my first race, I was out of my mind with excitement.

And I asked my mother what seemed like only a logical question: how many trophies do they hand out for each race? Three? Or four?

My mother gave me a look, and she sat me down in the living room and gave me a little straight talk.

She said that I had to face the facts: it was my first race, and I’d be up against tough competition; that almost everyone running would be older, and bigger, and more experienced. Just finishing a ten-mile run would be an achievement for a twelve-year-old kid.

It was fine advice, and I took it like any twelve-year-old boy: I went into a snit, and refused to speak more than a syllable at a time all the way to the race venue the next morning. My mother helped me harness my dogs, but as I remember I was still too indignant to say thank you.

But as I took off, everything leading up to the race faded away, and when the dogs finally slowed from the initial burst of the take-off, I got off the runners and began to run behind the sled as fast as I could.

Now, typically, a sled dog racer runs behind the sled when the dogs bog down, and rides the runners when the speed picks up again. In between, drivers pump the sled like a scooter.

But as far as I can remember I didn’t pump at all that day, and I only rode the runners on downhill slopes when I had no choice. Otherwise I ran full-tilt, as hard as I could in my boots, for most of that ten miles.

Eventually I ran past another team, and then another.

And before I knew it, I rounded a corner and came into sight of Heartbreak Hill, the long upward climb to the finish. I can’t say I ran the last hill, but I slogged it behind the sled, with the dogs dragging me up to the finish line.

And then I did the single most publicly embarrassing thing I’ve ever done in my entire life: I crossed the finish line, handed my team off to a total stranger, collapsed to my knees and — that’s right — vomited in a snow bank.

My mother finally helped me back to the cab of our truck, before un-harnessing my dogs, and then harnessing her own. Because it was time for her own race, but she made sure I was all right first, and then left me there in the cab.

It was about 20 minutes later that someone rapped on the window. It was a race official, come to tell me that I’d won my class by just 28 seconds. “And I just wanted to be the first to shake your paw,” the official said.

And then he left, and I sat there in the cold cab of the truck, feeling this very particular mix of deep exhaustion and elation and vindication.

It was a peculiar feeling I was never to feel again, until Election Night last week, when a campaign longer and tougher than any in recent history finally came to a close.

Because even though I watched the final moments of this race in a hotel ballroom surrounded by hundreds of cheering people, I felt somehow like I was twelve again, back in the cab of our old dog truck, parked out in the middle of a frozen field somewhere, fingers numb, but with the sudden sense that the rest of my life was just beginning. ♣♣♣

December 15th, 2008:
Let The Hundred-Year Feud Commence
You have to love it when ordinarily crafty political rhetoricians just up and say exactly
what they mean. From the Sunday shows, not ordinarily a showplace of candor:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You said, after the election, that Governor Palin has a bright
future in your party. Does that mean that, if she does choose to run for president, she can count on your support?
MCCAIN: Oh, no.
♣♣♣

December 16th, 2008:
On This Matter of Bush and Shoes

The best thing about the shoe-throwing in VDB’s opinion? Take a look at Al-
Maliki. This guy’s got balls made of spent uranium. Never moves a muscle during the trajectory of the first size 10. And during the second, he does so only to goal-tend for the American President, who is crouched behind his bullet-proof podium.

Two possibilities here.

One, that Nouri Al-Maliki understands the throwing of shoes. Been there, been beaned by that. Not worth flinching. The problem with this theory, though, is that Al- Maliki also lives in a neighborhood where people frequently throw bombs, bombs of all sorts, some disguised as everyday articles, like dogs and cell-phones and shoes. And the anxiety level has to be sky-high with the President actually standing in the room.

So the complete and utter cool begins to look just a tad unlikely. Which leads us to our second possibility, and here we verge on the openly conspiratorial: maybe, just maybe, the guy had an inkling that someone might be tasting some shoe- leather at this particular presser.

Let’s remember that Nouri’s had more than his share of overbearing phone calls from the Oval Office over the past several years, and would no doubt like to offer his own goodbye kiss.

Either way, time to get out of Dodge.
♣♣♣

October 14th, 2005:
Securing Dick Cheney

Okay, so last Wednesday I’m home cleaning out the refrigerator when the front
doorbell rings. Standing there are two guys in dark suits and tinted glasses; both have little curly flesh-colored wires trailing down out of one ear.

Now I’m no idiot, I know Secret Service when I see it. So I ask them in, and it turns out Dick Cheney is coming to Burlington the next day for a rally out at the airport. His guards are planning a high-security bait-and-switch: the media thinks Cheney’s going to fly onto the tarmac tomorrow noon, but for security reasons he’ll be here all along. They’re looking for a secure location in Burlington to stash him until the rally begins.

“Why me,” I ask.

“We understand you’ve upgraded security at your home recently.”

They had me there. For weeks, we’d had a skunk problem: this huge albino skunk had been grubbing in the back yard, just tearing it to pieces every night, and then retreating under our deck when the sun came up. So last weekend I’d made that back porch about as secure as a place gets, boards nailed everywhere and only one little padlocked maintenance hatch up top to get down in there.

So I showed these guys the deck and the hatchway down into the crawlspace, and they seemed satisfied. About four hours after sunset, a big shiny new car pulls up — one

of those PT cruisers, the kind that look like they just drove out of a ZZ Top video. And
sure enough, Dick Cheney gets out and he and the Secret Service guys chat a minute, and then they drive off.

Well, it turns out Cheney isn’t wild about going into the crawlspace right away, so he and I sit down at the table. There’s not much in the fridge, but we finally rip open a bag of Bugles, those little pointy corn snacks, and we get talking about world affairs and such. Finally Dick asks if I mind if he changes into his pajamas and slippers. Mi casa es su casa, I tell him.

Once he’s back at the table, I figure this is probably the only chance I’ll ever have to ask what I’ve always wanted to ask.

“Dick,” I begin.

“Call me Big-time,” he insists.

“How do you know an evil-doer when you see one, Big-time? I mean, you guys just always seem so positive.”

Now, you have to remind yourself all the time when you’re talking to Dick that the little curled lip thing he’s got going has nothing to do with your question. That’s just his face. He narrows an eye at me. “You just know, Phil. Because there are good-doers and evil-doers, and on the evil-doers there’s a scent of evil, as it were, something that doesn’t require evidence or proof or smoking guns. It’s a feeling, here,” he taps his pee- jays, right above the pacemaker, “a wrongness that some of us can sense.”

He takes another sip of his Sprite and then says, “Better hit the hay. I’ve got a twenty-minute speech to give tomorrow.” Dick chuckles a little, and he slowly shuffles out onto the porch in his slippers.

I turn the back light on while he levers his big body down into the secure crawlspace beneath the deck. I hear him turning in the small space, trying to get comfortable, and I can’t help but think of the albino skunk, out there somewhere in the night, angry and forlorn, with no place now to sleep.

♣♣♣

November 30th, 2005:
Porter Goss on the Beauty of Torture

CIA Director Porter Goss, clarifying the torture issue yesterday with Charlie
Gibson on ABC News:
“GIBSON: How do you define it?
GOSS: Well, I define torture probably the way most people would — in the eye of the beholder.”
So it’s a lot like beauty, then, in that sense. ♣♣♣

October 24th, 2007:
Romney Latest GOP Candidate to Play Updated 2008 Version of “Jack Mehoff”

Not overwhelmingly proud of it, but when I was in eighth grade, I took regular
part in a strange, white-knuckle game called “Jack Mehoff.” The rules were deceptively simple: you had to slip the name “Jack Mehoff” into actual classroom discussion, as unobtrusively as possible.

For example, when discussing World War II in Social Studies, you might ask, “Mr. McCarty, I heard that there was a secret squad set up to assassinate Hitler at one point, led by one of the early Marines named Zack Myrnoff or Jack Mehoff or something like that. Do you know anything about that at all, that Mehoff guy?”

And then you kept your face absolutely straight, not even a ghost of a smile. No matter what the other guys let loose with in the back row.

Having managed it, you were in the clear. But those who waited until near the end of the game were trying to slip the name “Jack Mehoff” by teachers who had already heard it 4 or 5 times in the previous week. And they were generally busted, and made to explain the whole rotten enterprise in the Principal’s office, one at a time.

If you need to understand why eighth grade boys were interested in foregrounding the name “Jack Mehoff” in the first place, then you really need to be reading another blog at this point.

But teenage onanism isn’t really the point.

The point is that more or less the same game has been run on the mainstream media for the last year, except that instead of “Jack Mehoff” the new version is called “Barack Osama,” and it’s played exclusively by GOP candidates, against Democratic hopeful Barack Obama.

It works like this: GOP candidate X “stumbles” or “commits a gaffe” by confusing Obama for Osama, and the media tut-tuts for a day or so. Mitt Romney is only the most recent player.

The MSM then “helps” Obama, the injured party, by broadcasting the “gaffe” complete with apologies and denials and histories of other times that various officials and candidates have made the same mistake.

And this has two predictable effects: 1) willy-nilly, Obama’s name is further linked in the public mind with America’s Public Enemy #1, and 2) the GOP candidate responsible for the “gaffe” shows the base (or the cool kids, think of them how you will) that he is willing to keep this Fox News gag running, even at the risk of a tongue-lashing in the Principal’s office.

It all boils down to the same thing Republicans have been doing to Democrats for years: oddly overt, bullying tactics that seem straight out of middle-school to you and me, but that nonetheless put Democrats in the position of the kid being bullied. Bush and his “Democrat Congress” taunts, to take another example.

And at that point, generally clueless voters only ever pick up on the aftermath: one kid looking innocent and indignant, while the other kid whines and cries.

Jack Mehoff, indeed.
♣♣♣

October 4th, 2007:
Thompson Admits Candidacy Baseless

Very occasionally, you pick up the newspaper and you read where a political
candidate has, for whatever reason, spoken a horrible, brutal truth. They have thrown off artifice entirely, and said something genuine. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, there’s an almost surreal tinge to it.

In this case, it was Fred Thompson, bored actor turned reluctant Presidential candidate. When asked about the slow start to his campaign by the Times, Thompson bridled, blaming the negative coverage of his launch on a pundit-ocracy deeply invested in the long campaign.

His own stealth campaign, he argued, had offended their writer-ly sensibilities.

But somewhere on the way to this self-serving explanation, Thompson lost his bearings, and spoke truth:
“Some may be vested in the notion that you can’t get in this late, that I’m trying to just
say, ‘Well, they’ve seen me on “Law & Order” and that will carry me to the presidency.’
They just don’t think that is right.”

Please, read that quote again, because it’s breathtaking. Even more breathtaking is that Thompson doesn’t seem to know it’s breathtaking. It genuinely puzzles him that the media “just don’t think that is right.”

Ronald Reagan, all right, just not quite as brainy. ♣♣♣

October 24th, 2005:
Announcing the New Bush Administration “Piece of Work” Awards

VDB would like to announce a coveted new award, limited to those
either in the Bush administration or the extended Bush family. The Vermont Daily Briefing “Piece of Work” Awards (VDB/POW!) will be awarded on a
semi-regular basis to administration types exhibiting semi-consciousness in their public statements or actions. The award is memorialized in an 18-karat gold statuette of former-First Lady Barbara Bush, who set the standard for once and future POW! recipients with her remarks to reporters during her trip to the crowded Houston Astrodome following Hurricane Katrina. Asked about the plight of the hurricane’s victims, Barbara was refreshingly upbeat: “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them.”

Bravo, former-First Lady Barbara Bush. You are — by any standard — truly a Piece of Work.
♣♣♣

October 24th, 2005:

The New Rove Spin

The Times reports on the new Rove spin, designed to soften his image in advance
of indictment:

“But even as White House officials and Republicans say that Mr. Rove is human and that the leak investigation has taken an enormous toll on his family, they also insist that everyone is focused on the work at hand, and that Mr. Rove is good at compartmentalizing his life.”

I love the fact that the very first thing they need to sell the world on is that the guy is, in fact, human.
♣♣♣

October 10th, 2005:
Howard Dean Owes Me A Sandwich, or, The Entire History of Howard Dean, Told
in One Sandwich
A dispatch from Philly, the deli owner…

So coupla years ago, I’m driving down the highway, and I hear Howard Dean is
running for President, and I almost wrap the Bonneville around a tree. Howard I know from the bad old days, back when Goose and Loopy and Eight-Ball and me and Howard, we were the Rat Pack of Vermont. We called Howard “Deano” in those days, you know, like for Dean Martin. The five of us used to rule this town: we were twenty-one, good- looking, quick with our dukes, tall — well, except for Howard. Best time of my life.

And then Howard and I had our falling out, and it’s been almost thirty-five years since I sat down with the man. It was over something stupid. I took over my old man’s deli when he passed in the seventies, and the guys would all come around. Howard loved this hot pastrami/hot pepper sandwich I made f’rim called a Disco Inferno. Whenever I heated up a Disco Inferno in the steamer, all the boys would start chanting, “Burn, Baby, Burn!”

Now, I never charged these guys for food, understand. Never.

So one lunch rush, I’m waiting on five, six people at once, I’m in the weeds, and I look over and Howard’s behind the counter putting his own Inferno into the sandwich

steamer. The guy can’t even wait for me to make his free meal, he’s gotta come behind
the counter and make his own.

I’m livid now. I tell him he owes me for the sandwich.

And that’s when Deano says this thing to me I never heard before. He laughs and says he’s “I’m a fiscal conservative,” and then he walks out of my place. And we’re quits for friends.

And then, couple years goes by, Howard’s Lt. Governor, Howard’s Governor once, twice, you know the story. And the whole time he’s Mr. Fiscal Conservative/Social Liberal, and I’m wiping down the counter thinking, Mr. Sandwich-stealing Weasel is what this guy really is.

But now he’s running for President, and obviously he wants all his little ducks in a row because one of his spin doctors comes down to my deli last night and he says, “Howard wants a meeting. Tonight at 8, his office, the Statehouse.”

I keep polishing the meat slicer. “Howard knows I don’t close till 9.”

The spin doctor thinks a second. “Okay, make it 10 o’clock. But there’s one rule. Nobody brings up the sandwich.”
I stop polishing, and I figure, what the hell. I tell him I’ll be there with bells on — real sarcastic though. Now I’m no idiot, I know why Howard wants to smooth things over now. He’s going national, and last thing he needs is the bad old Vermont Rat Pack days biting him in his pinstriped butt.

So I get to the Statehouse, guard takes me to Howard’s office: low lighting, nice woodwork. Howard doesn’t get up from his desk even, but the spin doctor pulls out a chair for me. And then for forty, fifty minutes I listen to Howard’s pitch, about why can’t we have socially responsible programs even while we maintain fiscal discipline, universal health care this, justice that. And so I say, “Well, you seem to know a heckuva lot about what the other 250 million people in the country need.”

And the spin doctor gives me this heavy look, and he says, “Hey wise up, pal, Howard’s got dreams — big dreams.”

And then I can’t take it anymore, and I say “Yeah, well you know what? I got dreams too, Howard, yeah, me. And dream #1 is that someday you’re gonna pay me back for that sandwich you stole off me when we were kids!”

Whoosh! That does it. Just like that Howard and I are screaming at each other, and this screaming goes on for three, four hours — full-throat, no let-up.

And finally right around 2 in the morning, Howard just seems to run out of steam. He falls back in his chair, and he seems all the sudden smaller, vulnerable-like. And then he gives me this look and he says, “Hey, Philly, I’m sorry I disrespected you over the sandwich. It was a stupid thing. I’ll pay you for it, if you want.”

I’m stunned. But Howard’s still got this scared look, and I can see something else is really the matter. That’s when the spin doctor says, “Howard’s worried about what they’re gonna to him in Iowa. That’s when the attacks really start, the character

assassination. They try to knee-cap the front-runner there, before New Hampshire. You
know it’s coming, but you don’t from where,” the spin doctor says.

And that’s when the Rat Pack days come rushing back to me, and for the first time in thirty-five years I feel like I know exactly who my real friends are. “Deano,” I whisper across the desk, “they try to do that to you and I’m gonna tear ‘em limb from limb.” Just like that, we’re tight again.

So, needless to say, I got behind Deano in a big way. I’m phone-banking, I’m jamming Dean pamphlets in people’s to-go orders. I got a sticker on the meat slicer to this day that says “A Lean Dean Voting Machine.” And then, I’m closing up one cold frickin’ night in the middle of January, and I look up to where the TV’s hanging in the corner of the room, and there’s Howard, and his face looks like a Big Boy tomato, and he’s shaking his fist and screamin’ about how he’s going to the White House, and then he finishes with this, kinda, “Yee-ha!” sounds like something offa Bonanza. CNN’s calling it the “I Have a Scream” speech. Cute.

By the time I wake up in the morning, the radio Dj’s have already re-mixed Howard’s scream with everything they can think of: Ozzy Osbourne, the Twilight Zone theme, even that pig that used to be on Green Acres? Arnold? Even Arnold they got re- mixed with my oldest pal in the world, Howard Dean. They made him look a buffoon. And the sad truth of it is that by the end of the week, I felt a little dicey about the Dean sticker on the meat slicer. People were making remarks, and I don’t need that in my business.

But I stuck with the guy, even then, because I know what I know, and that angry Big Boy tomato ain’t Howard. I stuck even when he lost in Iowa, even when he tanked in New Hampshire. I stuck like super-glue. If Dean went down the john, I swirled right down there with him. Because he’s a friend, and because he was a damn good governor of the best state in America for ten long years, and he knows his stuff. He woulda been a fine President, I tell anybody that.

But John Kerry ran away with the nomination, and then, when it looked like Kerry might go all the way, the hit men opened up on him, and they put his lights out for good. All the Democrats were just road kill, then.

So that was the end of Howard Dean, or that’s what I thought. But then one day about six, seven months later, I’m swamped at the deli, I got a kid works for me who’s out sick, and I got customers out the wazoo, and the phone rings. I cradle it against my shoulder while I put together a tuna melt, and it’s Howard.

In a whisper, he tells me he’s running for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. You know, the guy who takes it to the Republicans every time they put a microphone in his face? The guy who’s job it is to toss bombs out into the media? Howard’s running for that, he’s lining up votes.

I try to get my head around that for a second, and then I whisper back, “Howard, you think you can ace this thing?”

“I got the votes in the bank,” he says. “But I need to know something, Philly. I need to know you got my back. You’re my base,” he whispers, “in fact, you and the guys are the base of my base, Philly.”

It was a beautiful thing to say.

He hung up then, and this mouthy customer’s yelling for his tuna melt, but the whole time I can hardly hear the noise of the deli, because I’m remembering about this short little kid Howard and how he loved those Disco Inferno sandwiches I used to make for him. This kid’s gonna be the new voice of the Democratic Party. And I’m laughing to myself while I’m wrapping up the melt, because these people who knee-capped Howard in Iowa, they didn’t know whose knees they were busting.

I’m laughing, and I’m thinking, burn, baby, burn. ♣♣♣

March 8th, 2007:
The Battle for John McCain’s Sandwich
Back during the Dean campaign, I did a piece in the voice of a deli owner named Philly,
a guy who used to run with Dean in the old Rat Pack days in Burlington, supposedly
(”Howard Dean Owes Me a Sandwich”). Since good characters don’t come along every
day, I brought Philly out of retirement to comment on the current McCain campaign.
About which there is much to comment, little of it good.

Look, there’s a couple a things you gotta know about me:

#1) I run a deli in Winooski I took over after my old man passed in the ‘70’s, and I don’t fool around when it comes to sandwiches, and

#2) my family was voting Democratic when Roosevelt was in diapers.

But even with all that history, I always liked John McCain. He spoke his mind, you know, and he had this rascally kind of grin. Stood up to the tobacco companies. Spent five years in a POW camp, don’t forget.

So when McCain came through New Hampshire in 2000, he did a little one-day swing through Vermont too. And because I got friends downtown, I got the nod when it came to catering the event at City Hall here.

This was right around the time McCain went on national TV and called Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance.” Beautiful. Just what needed saying, I thought.

And so when it came time to make McCain’s lunch, I took my time, and I actually invented a new sandwich just for him: The Johnny B. Goode, a foot-long sub laid out with all the top end meats, the roast beef, the prosciutto, and some 12-year-old smoked cheddar they only make down in Ferrisburgh. Hot peppers, all the veggies.

Best sandwich I ever made.

And that’s not just me flapping my yap, either: John McCain himself said so, after all the reporters and people cleared out of the hall. He comes walking over, still working on the tail end of the sandwich, and he shakes my hand.

“That’s the best sub I’ve ever had, my friend,” he tells me, “and I’ve had subs in every hole in the wall deli in every state in America. Don’t ever change it.”

He’s got long red scars on his face and his neck you usually don’t see on TV, but the rascally grin is even better in person.

He shakes my hand, and just for a second, I think, I might be voting for a Republican for President this trip.

Of course, in about two weeks, he’s road kill under the wheels of the Bush machine. And that was that. McCain dropped out of the picture.

Until last week.

Just as I’m unlocking the front door for the day, the phone rings. It’s McCain’s people. Of course McCain’s running for President again, he’s gonna be in New Hampshire to meet with some local big-wigs the next day, and he wants me to cater the lunch.

He loves this Johnny B. Goode sandwich so much, he wants me to make up 100 of these things, and drive ‘em over the state line to Hanover.

Did I say yes? You gotta ask?

And so the whole day I go into overdrive: I’m stockpiling the 12-year-old cheese, I’m prepping the proscuitto, and making sure the rolls are fresh-fresh, not just fresh. But about 2 in the afternoon, the phone rings.

It’s the spin doctor again. He wants to know if I can 86 the prosciutto. They’re worried maybe some in the crowd don’t eat ham. And I hesitate, but whatever, you know? It’s a sandwich, not the Mona Lisa. So I say sure.

Couple hours later, another phone call. This time it’s the hot peppers. McCain’s new brain thinks some people might find the hot peppers, you know, hot. So out they go.

And then a third call, twenty minutes later. Now the guy wants to know if I mind if they say the food came from a deli in New Hampshire. “Look,” I say, “I’m not gonna lie.”

So the guy thinks a minute, and he comes up with a last-ditch suggestion: “Fine, drive the subs down, but leave them open-face until you get to Hanover — then we close ‘em up, and the campaign can say they were made in New Hampshire.”

Do you believe that? If I didn’t have a counter overflowing Johnny B. Goode foot-longs, I’d say take a hike.

But I do, so I don’t.

It isn’t until next morning that the phone rings again, and you gotta believe me when I tell you, it’s McCain himself. He sounds kind of hassled, and he apologizes, but they gotta cancel the order. Big donor in New Hampshire’s gonna handle the event.

“But you’ll get paid, Philly, not to worry,” McCain says, and the rascally smile’s there in his voice, even.
“Oh, I’m not worried about the money,” I tell him, “what I’m worried about is your voice.”

“My voice,” he says, confused all of the sudden.

“Yeah,” I say, “your voice. For some reason, you sound different this time around, Johnny.” And that’s when I hang up the phone.

♣♣♣

December 8th, 2007:
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

At the very front of my local mega-supermarket there’s a long table covered with
books. It doesn’t seem to belong there, this table, because the books are used paperbacks, some yellow with age. Everything else in the store is blindingly new and fresh, but not these books, sales of which may benefit a charity of some kind — I’ve never been clear on that end of it.

What I do know is that the books are almost all romance novels, with titles like “Love’s Fury” and “Furious Love” and “The Year of Loving Furiously.”

I usually give the table a wide berth, because my life is a pretty precarious contraption, and any more love or fury could easily bring the whole thing crashing down.

But the other night, I had an honest-to-God intuition: that if I searched through every single book on that table, I’d find something rare and strange and valuable.

And there, under a stack at the back, I found it: a 1976 paperback edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s non-fiction essays called Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Vonnegut is a hero of mine, but I’d never seen this collection before.

It’s full of very odd little bits: Vonnegut’s address to the American Physical Society, a 1970 commencement address at Bennington College, that sort of thing. I paid a dollar in cash for the book, then stayed up long into the night reading it cover to cover.

Like most of Vonnegut’s novels, this non-fiction is very funny and very angry, and the anger stems from three linked historical events: the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the madness of Vietnam.

Having himself survived the firebombing of Dresden in an actual underground slaughterhouse, Vonnegut was never able to entirely accept World War II as a “good war,” a clash of angels and devils.

In an address at the Wheaton College Library, Vonnegut deliberately upset that easy opposition: “We were empty-headed children in that war, as all ground soldiers are . . . . And one idea that was put into our heads was that our enemies were so awful, so evil, that we, by contrast, must be remarkably pure. That illusion of purity, to which we were entitled in a way, has become our curse today.”

The more you read of Vonnegut, the more you realize that whenever he speaks of World War II, he also means Vietnam. And the genuinely heart-breaking thing about reading these non-fiction snippets in 2007 is how clearly and directly a deceased Kurt Vonnegut is also addressing Iraq, and the War on Terror.

To take one mind-blowing example, there’s a little three-page snippet from 1971 called “Torture and Blubber,” published just after the the Pentagon Papers. Among other things, Vonnegut is livid that the secret documents showed top Pentagon officials explicitly referring to their bombing campaigns as an instrument of torture, like the rack.

“I am sorry we tried torture,” Vonnegut says, once he’s settled down, “I am sorry we tried anything. I hope we never try torture again. It doesn’t work. Human beings are stubborn and brave animals everywhere. They can endure amazing amounts of pain if they have to. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have had to.”

In a sense, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons bears out all of the anti-War arguments of the 21st-century Left. But lest anyone get too comfortable with even that black-and-white opposition, Vonnegut also rebukes pacifists like himself.

His are words to remember in the coming year, no matter who wins the White House: “Never mind who lied. Everybody should shut up for a while. Let there be deathly silence as our armada sails home.” ♣♣♣

November 17th, 2005:
WMD Found, Reader Reports

Re: the infamously missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, my man NP points out
that they seem to have been found — in our soldiers’ mortar tubes. Turns out we’ve been using white phosphorous as a weapon, one designed to have catastrophic psychological effects (as enemy soldiers see those around them being burned alive by it). The BBC has the story, and some devastating analysis.

We torture in secret prisons, and we thereby undercut every moral argument we make with regard to torture. We use chemical weapons, and we thereby undercut every moral argument we make with regard to WMD (see also our use of “Daisy-Cutter” ordinance which so dwarfs other conventional ordinance that it might as well be considered WMD).

Is it any wonder that the world simply laughs at us when we sit down at the UN to jawbone about freedom, about human rights? ♣♣♣

December 5th, 2007:
Ron Paul Finally Hits the Big Time: Now Being Smeared by Trumped-Up “Brothel
Endorsement” In Nevada

Ron Paul, like Dean in 2003, has been invisibly empowered well past the point of
comfort for many in more visible positions of power. There is talk that his forces could easily disrupt other candidates’ plans in NH, if not deliver the nomination outright. Which means it’s time for the media to amp up the wackiness quotient, and attribute it to Paul.

For example, there appeared this news report from a local AP affiliate in Nevada. Ostensibly, the reporter is covering a brothel owner’s “endorsement” of Paul, but you don’t have to watch long to see that it’s a low-grade hatchet job. And not just on Paul: the brothel owner volunteers the information that 60% of his clientele are Democrats.

NB: Nevada is scheduled to caucus January 19th, in the sweet spot between Iowa/New Hampshire and Super-Super February 5.

So look for more brothel “endorsements” and hooker “honk and waves” out of the Silver State going forward.
♣♣♣

November 28th, 2005:
Breaking Supreme Court News

The AP has breaking news: part of the marble facade on the Supreme Court
building in D.C. has collapsed, no one injured apparently.

Send in the strict constructionists, pronto.

♣♣♣

August 28th, 2007:
The VT Connection: What Goes Around Comes Around for Senator Larry Craig,
and No, We Don’t Mean That in a Hot Way

By now you’ve read more than you probably care to read about Idaho Senator
Larry Craig, airport bathrooms, and the complicated semaphore of anonymous inter-stall sex.

Now, rest assured that VDB isn’t above jumping up and down on the guy for sheer hypocrisy as a legislator, just because he’s down. We’re not. It’s just that several hundred thousand outlets have already beaten us to the punch.

And so we content ourselves with bringing you, as always, the generally unreported Vermont connection. In this case, there’s a nicely karmic twist.

Senator Craig was of course a member of the Singing Senators, an admittedly hokey but good-natured PR vehicle that also included John Ashcroft (currently lionized as the hapless invalid in the US Attorney scandal), Trent Lott (currently undergoing media rehabilitation after pro-segregationist remarks led to his ouster as Senate Majority Leader), and the now-retired Jim Jeffords.

The four friends traveled and sang together, occasionally hooking up with name acts like Charley Pride and the Oak Ridge Boys.

Until Jeffords jumped, that is.

In 2001, after Jeffords announced his clearly agonizing decision to leave the GOP, he was cut very little slack by anyone in the Republican Party, but the least slack of all came from Larry Craig.

According to the Conservative Media Research Center (a low-rent version of Media Matters), Craig had only one thing to say when asked about Jeffords and his decision to caucus with Democrats:

“I will not sing with Senator Jeffords anymore.” How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, the scorn of a desperately closeted gay family-values Republican.

It’s taken six or seven years for the worm to turn, but it’s fair to say that if Trent Lott or John Ashcroft had their druthers today, they’d undoubtedly prefer to play the Grand Old Opry with Jim Jeffords than with Larry Craig.

And when it comes right down to it, wouldn’t we all. ♣♣♣

September 28th, 2007:
All the Larry Craig News That’s Fit to Print

There are many beautiful aspects to the Larry Craig saga, but more than anything
we love it because it just keeps on giving. Not since O.J. marched out to find Nicole’s real killer has America witnessed anything like Craig’s legal fight to right the wrongs done him in that Minneapolis bathroom.

But to cut to the chase: Craig’s bid to overturn his guilty plea for Way Disorderly Conduct seems to be headed nowhere fast.

Hennepin County District Judge Charles Porter Jr. did everything but spin his index finger next to his temple in the universal “crazy sign” when Craig’s lawyer rolled out his case yesterday.

But that wasn’t the beauty part. No, the best action was out in the parking lot, among the protestors.

Those would be the pro-Craig protestors. From the Star-Tribune: A couple of pro-Craig demonstrators came in costume and carried signs. One read:
“Fight terrorists, not toe-tappers” and “Next time pee, don’t plea.”
Jason Gabbert, of Apple Valley, was dressed as an airport police officer. Anthony Wright
attempted to dress as Craig. They said they brought toilets for a full-on demonstration,

but were told to put them away by security officers. The two say they are political
centrists, but Gabbert said Craig “shouldn’t have been arrested. There was no evidence
to make an arrest.”

Now, that took courage. Almost like the civil rights protests of the early 60’s, except that Gabbert and Wright took off from work, rented toilets, and fought for an aging Senator’s right to frottage. [Cue up “We Shall Overcome”]

It’s all good with this story, and it’s a bit gooder every day. And the best of all is taking a look at the totality of Craig’s output in the Senate, in light of recent events. It gives most of his statements a whole new dimension: width.

Here is Craig, speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1993, about whether the Ethics Committee should be empowered to issue subpoenas: “We have argued for over two centuries, and very exclusively, that the right of the
Member to serve rests only with the citizens he serves or she serves and not with this
body.”

Amen, Larry. Although we would imagine that at this point, your constituents back in Idaho would rather not have the right of the Member resting quite so closely.

If you know what we mean.
♣♣♣

June 22nd, 2007:
Looking for Sense in the Senseless: Michelle Gardner-Quinn and Carmen Tarleton

From my window overlooking the main green at the University of Vermont, I can
see the central fountain, and beside it a small memorial to Michelle Gardner-Quinn. The memorial is a temporary thing, a posterboard with some photographs and bunches of fresh flowers, but at this point the green would seem altogether incomplete without it.

In case you’ve forgotten, Michelle Gardner-Quinn was kidnapped in Burlington, on the night of October 7. Her body was later found near Huntington Gorge, and evidence suggests that she died one of the most brutal deaths imaginable.

If I look off to the south out my office window, toward the leafy streets of the Hill section, I can almost see the spot where she vanished. I was thinking about Gardner-Quinn the other day because another horrific attack was in the news, this one in Thetford. Carmen Tarleton, a young woman in the midst of a divorce, had been attacked by her estranged husband, Herbert Rodgers, and burned over most of her body with lye.

Doctors rate her chances of survival as exceedingly slim.

But in the article I read on the Tarleton attack there was a quote from Thetford Police Chief Jim Lanctot that stuck with me. Lanctot had apparently spoken with Carmen Tarleton before the attack, and he’d offered her help without being asked.

I was so struck by that that I decided to call Chief Lanctot and ask him about his conversation with Tarleton personally.

Lactot told me that, at first, he and Tarleton were talking about something else entirely — he no longer remembers exactly what — but when he asked Tarleton about life in general, she mentioned that she was in the middle of a divorce.

At the time, she didn’t sound worried or threatened, but Lanctot did what he routinely does: he mentioned the Women’s Information Service, a hotline network that goes by the acronym WISE and draws together many of the area’s support services for battered women.

Tarleton was a nurse at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and she already knew about the WISE hotline. And again, she gave Lanctot the impression that there was nothing to worry about in her particular case.

Still, before letting the subject drop, Lanctot quickly mentioned both 911 and the possibility of a restraining order, if either ever seemed necessary.

That was it. I thanked the Chief, and I hung up.

The call seemed to confirm some of the things I’d been thinking: that in this case, in spite of the tragic outcome, the social network itself seems to have been working. Quality services were available; and although he hadn’t been asked for the information, Chief Lanctot provided it anyway — made it clear that he was ready to help.

In that way, the system was not only prepared but proactive, in ways that other police forces might envy — even in large metropolitan areas.

Of course, none of that prevented the Thetford attack. Herbert Rodgers told police that only the actual word of God would have stopped him. And it’s unrealistic to think we could ever rid ourselves entirely of bouts of insanity, or homicidal rage.

But Lanctot’s attempt at intervention struck me as the one lone ray of hope in the entire sad story. This was not a case where no one stretched out a hand, or where people ignored a woman’s screams.

And when you work in an office that overlooks the memorial to UVM’s own Michelle Gardner-Quinn, you have to take your rays of hope where you can find them.

♣♣♣

February 21st, 2006:
Your Daily Devotional

Drove to Montpelier this morning to —wait for it —deliver the morning
devotional to the Vermont House of Representatives.

I know; it seems odd to me too.

But it’s the second time Speaker Symington’s office has called, and each time I’ve been honored. And each time I’ve done my very level best to be devotional. This morning I read a true story about God throwing a Bible at me…

In 1974, when I was twelve, I separated from the Lutheran church in what I like to think of as a schism of one. The church I attended with my mother and my brother and sisters was called Ascension Lutheran, and it was run by two very strict, bible-reading grandmotherly women.

The schism involved a disagreement between these two ladies of the church and myself over when I should be allowed to take my confirmation. Their argument was that I’d paid so little attention during my two-year training that I’d need to repeat the entire sequence.

My argument was that four years was a lot to ask in exchange for a metal detector, which is what my mother’d promised me at the other end of the tunnel.

So I broke with the church, as the theologians say, but God and I remained on the best of terms and I never had any reason to feel that He held a grudge of any sort until a few years ago.

Now, I know that occasionally I mix fiction with truth in these commentaries, and I know that doing so makes it hard for anyone to believe me when I say that what I’m about to tell is completely and utterly factual. But that’s the case: this story is absolutely true.

Three years ago, on a Sunday morning, I’m driving on Battery Street in Burlington, coming toward the intersection with Pearl. I’ve got my three-year-old daughter Gwendolyn strapped in the car seat. Suddenly church bells start going off somewhere in the city, and Gwendolyn asks me what the noise is.

I tell her that those are church bells. Then she wants to know what church is. I say church is a place where some people go on Sunday morning.

She’s satisfied with that, and we pull up to the intersection of Pearl and Battery and I stop the car at the red light.

Suddenly — and again, I’m speaking the truth here — a big four-door sedan comes roaring around the corner from Pearl. As the car negotiates the turn, the back door flies open briefly and a book comes hurtling out. The door closes and the sedan powers past me down Battery, disappearing around Battery Park.

Now, I can tell from the trajectory of the book and from the noise it made sliding along the blacktop that the book is sitting just outside my driver’s side door. And let’s face it, I’m a book guy by trade, so there’s never a question but that I’m going to open the door and look.

And there’s the book, sitting precisely outside my door — I don’t even have to lean out to grab it. I pick it up, toss it on the passenger seat, and close my door just as the light turns green. I negotiate the turn onto Pearl, and then I have a chance to flip the book over.

It’s a Read With Me Story Bible for Children, suitable for ages 3-7. Gwendolyn, again, is three.

And Gwendolyn is no dummy; she knows we picked up something. “What’s that?” she asks.

“It’s a Bible,” I tell her. “That’s what people read in church on Sunday mornings.”

She gets right to the point. “Is it for me?” she asks.

Now while it’s true that I need to have a bible physically ejected from a moving car and slid to within several inches of my hand, I don’t need to be hit over the head with it.

“Yes,” I say, “yes. This book is without a doubt for you.”

I pass it over the seat to her, and she opens it up to a picture that looks like Samson and Delilah. Delilah’s got her hands on the guy’s hair, and Gwendolyn gives the image a long look, and it isn’t five minutes before the whole back seat begins to take on the thoughtful air of a chapel.

♣♣♣

January 23rd, 2006:
Monday Must-Read Sentence: Paging P.B. Shelley

Nine times out of ten, the VDB Monday Must-Read Sentence is the most
newsworthy bite from the weekend’s crop of bites. But on rare occasions, a line makes it
through on raw, wild, unanticipated poetic power.

The Sunday Boston Globe ran one of those “Iraq in Transition” stories that have become an identifiable sub-genre over the last two years or so — a detailed run-down, in this case, of the harried Iraqi oil industry. The meat of it was familiar stuff; production is less than it was pre-invasion, insurgents have been fabulously successful in choking off the flow through sabotage and direct attack, etc.

Still, some of the figures were potent and new: “The oil industry . . . has been hit with nearly 300 major attacks since 2003,” for example.

That’s just major attacks.

But Farah Stockman, the reporter on the piece, is apparently made of finer stuff than your average journalist. In describing the near-daily attacks on the Kirkuk pipelines, she captures the hopeless nature of the battle with an MMRS that reads like Romantic poetry, like Shelley, or Byron. She’s describing the aftermath of an insurgent attack:

“Even when the pipeline is cut, the fields must keep pumping — ‘like a heart,’ Maquire said — so engineers must put the oil back in the ground, a practice that ruins the oil fields’ underground reserves.”

The image is stunning, and multi-tiered: not only a massive heart pumping helplessly onto the surface, but engineers then routing the oil back into the sand from which they’ve so laboriously drained it — only to make their own task far more difficult in the future.

All of this with the bleak sense that the oil in the ground, like the blood in the body, is finite, and non-renewable.

It made me think of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and because the poem’s fourteen lines have more to say about the sheer lunacy of Iraq than any of the best-selling non- fiction currently available, VDB suggests reading it in full: I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said–”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart….Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bboundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
VDB memo to Farah Stockman: Love your work, really. But you might think
about giving the sonnet form a shot.

Because clearly you’ve got the chops.

♣♣♣

January 6th, 2009:
Peter Welch Did Not Marry Dick Cheney. Repeat: Welch Did Not Marry Dick
Cheney

Press releases have a tendency to clog the in-box, which cannot be allowed under
any circumstances, email being the food of the Gods. Ordinarily one quick glance is all they get before being digitally shredded. And so when we received a press release from the Welch folk a few days back, we gave it the micro-glance and our heart stopped, because all we saw were the words “Peter Welch” and “Cheney” and “married.” And we thought, well, Jesus, not impeaching the Vice President is one thing, but who knew?

Turns out everything was on the up-and-up: Congressman Welch married his fairly longtime flame Vermont Rep. Margaret Cheney on January 2nd. Imagine VDB’s relief.

Of course, married life will change things. No more madcap tanning parties on North Beach, to name only one. Our congratulations to the happy couple.

♣♣♣

February 13th, 2006:
Cheney Locks, Unloads

So Dick Cheney is out quail hunting in Texas with a bunch of
millionaires, and he blasts one of them in the face with his 28-guage shotgun. Time stops; no one moves.

Then someone rushes to the fallen tycoon, feels for a pulse, and then turns desperately to the others and says the fateful words: “Is anyone here a spin-doctor?”

As luck would have it, you’re the only spin-doctor in the party, and everyone turns to you in the crisis. They move away from the bloody plutocrat, giving him — and you — breathing room.

You step forward without thinking. You didn’t ask for this responsibility, but it comes with your profession.

And so you do what needs to be done: You blame the victim, and gingerly replace Up with Down. From the New York Times: “‘This all happened pretty quickly,’ Ms. Armstrong said in a telephone interview from her ranch. Mr. Whittington, she said, ‘did not announce — which would be protocol — ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m coming up,’ ‘ she said.

“‘He didn’t do what he was supposed to do,’ she added, referring to Mr. Whittington. ‘So
when a bird flushed and the vice president swung in to shoot it, Harry was where the bird was.’
“Mr. Whittington was ’sprayed — peppered, is what we call it — on his right side, on part of his face, neck, shoulder and rib cage,’ she said, noting that she, too, had been sprayed on her leg in a hunting accident. “‘A shotgun sprays a bunch of little bitty pellets; it’s not a bullet involved,’ Ms. Armstrong said. She said she believed that Mr. Cheney was shooting a 28-gauge shotgun and added that guests typically bring their own firearms.”
It’s not a bullet involved. Sweet.

That’s why spin doctors make the super-sized dollars, my friends. Because they can turn bullets into little bitty pellets, into veritable pepper. And they can do it under more pressure than you and I can even imagine.

And if the deny-the-bullet strategy tanks, keep an eye peeled for a last-minute claim of Executive privilege.

It’s not a bullet involved. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that’s pathetic.

♣♣♣

February 17th, 2006:
The Ballad of Dick Cheney and the
Bottle

Gosh, I
don’t want to be a kill-joy — since the Vice President has now come out like a man and admitted that he may well bear responsibility for the bullets he fired into his wealthy friend, and since the President quickly accepted this gesture as just what the situation demanded — but might I point out that between Bush and Cheney they total three separate arrests for Driving While Under the Influence?

Cheney, actually, has twice as many as the President: two, from his day’s laying power lines as a young man in Wyoming.

Is it so very odd then to ask — given that the White House is now shared by two recovering alcoholics, one of whom still apparently drinks beer for lunch — whether Cheney had more than a taste before locking and unloading?

Especially since Cheney has now admitted, albeit belatedly, to drinking a few hours before the near-fatal shooting? And most especially since deputies were turned away from the Vice President’s hacienda until the following morning?

I don’t know about you, but when I read the following snippet of Cheney’s softball interview with Fox News, I can’t help but think: Here’s an alcoholic who just doesn’t get it.

“Q: Was anybody drinking in this party?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. You don’t hunt with people who drink. That’s not a good idea. We had –
Q: So he wasn’t, and you weren’t?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct. We’d taken a break at lunch — go down under an old — ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch.”

Forget Congressional hearings. Forget impeachment. Forget a forced resignation. This is the sort of mad babbling logic that earns you an intervention, and that right quick.

♣♣♣

November 7th, 2006:
VDB and Dick Cheney Plan Election Days

When it comes to Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or Halloween, VDB
couldn’t care less how the day is ordered. Goose for breakfast, candy before lunch, football if and when — it just doesn’t matter.

But election day is another story. That we micro-manage, and plot out in 15- minute intervals on a sophisticated spreadsheet generated by secret Defense Department software not available on the open market. Because it couldn’t matter more to us.

Not so for Dick Cheney. Where will Big Dick be on the Big Day? Hunting. With a shotgun.

Now, consider your own reaction to that news. Imagine that reaction multiplied a million-fold, ignited by a series of late-night jokes, and political cartoons in tomorrow’s paper.

Why, if you’re Cheney, do you risk becoming the butt of a national joke on the morning your party is trying desperately to stave off losses generated originally, as a matter of fact, by your own short-sighted and mean-spirited policies?

Because you simply don’t care.

Cheney told George Stephanopoulos that regardless of the outcome tomorrow, the Iraq War will continue “full-speed ahead.” He went on to point out the essentially non- essential nature of the voting public:
“It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to
continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.
We’re not running for office. We’re doing what we think is right.”

If they retain the House by one vote, Cheney will hail it as a vindication of the policy in Iraq, and tout it for his last two years in office. If the GOP loses by 50 seats, though, it just doesn’t matter — at least in the sense that it doesn’t matter.

That, friends, is what folks mean when they refer to a man as a cast-iron son of a bitch.

♣♣♣

March 2nd, 2006:
Katrina, and Bush’s Room 101

So yes, Bush is in hotter water than ever on Katrina.

Not only have we hit the six-month post-hurricane mark — without anything resembling a concerted Federal approach to the rebuilding process — but videotape released yesterday catches Bush in a number of untruths.

The videotaped briefing shows Bush being warned by hurricane experts that the levees might well fail. It shows Michael Brown — yes, that Michael Brown — declaring the storm “the big one,” an image that will do more to clear his own ravaged media- complexion than any other.

But those aren’t the most intriguing elements caught on the Presidential briefing tape.

No, for VDB, the most interesting aspect is the room in which Bush is sitting to receive the video-linked conference.

Keep in mind: Bush is on vacation at the ranch when this storm swirls toward land-fall.

He’s relaxing, chopping brush, working out, riding his bike. And then, someone comes and taps him gently on the arm, and he has to go through all the rigmarole of

taking off his helmet and kneepads, and then towel off, search
unsuccessfully and profanely for the Speed Stick that someone failed to leave handy, shoulder on a coat and tie, and go into The Room.

The Room was built with these sorts of Presidential com-links in mind, just as the Ranch itself was designed as a Reagan-style Presidential retreat. So the Room has dignified paneling and white wainscoted doors and executive recessed lighting.

But in the Room is Work, and Responsibility, and Bush resents being dragged into it.

It is as though the Room contains everything he’s ever fled — Yale final exams, his oil company’s spreadsheets, sessions of the Texas legislature, and now, all of the pressing policy minutiae of a two-term Presidency.

Aides can feel Bush’s discomfort when he’s forced to stay too long within its close walls; they see his attention flag, and the foot of his crossed right leg begin to jiggle.

Now imagine that the split second Bush leaves the Room, he can strip off the coat and tie, a valet will hand him an icy-cold Dr. Pepper, and he can go back to working on his bike.

Never forget: Bush is now called “W” in no small part because his handlers thought long and hard and methodically about how to avoid having voters think of him as “Junior.” Those “W” buttons at the early campaign events, and people making a three-

fingered “W” sign to the camera, those were no accident. Those handlers knew their man,
and they knew his weaknesses.

As Orwell points out in 1984, all of us have a Room 101, which contains “the worst thing in the world,” that thing each of us most fears.

Unfortunately for Bush — and tragically for New Orleans — his room eventually assumed physical form, it sits right in the middle of the play-space he always wanted, and his job requires that he enter it.

♣♣♣

October 6th, 2006:
The All-Time Epic Barbara Bush Racquetball Smackdown

When I first got the word that former-First Lady Barbara Bush flying into
Burlington for a Republican fundraiser, I got this serious cold shiver right down the track of my spine. Not because of her politics, or even because the buck really stops with her when it comes to her son’s command of the English language.

No, I got the willies because Mrs. Bush was flying in on a Wednesday.

And Wednesday’s my racquetball day.

Now, very few Americans know that Barbara Bush plays competitive level racquetball. While she was in the White House, this little factoid clashed with her grandmotherly image, and so she played almost exclusively in a custom-built court beneath the Rose Garden.

But she’s very competitive in her style of play, very in-your-face, and finally she just couldn’t be satisfied beating up on Secret Service agents with no understanding of the game.

And so occasionally, when she’s out on the road, she drops in unannounced, at universities and health clubs around the nation, looking for someone with serious game.

As for me, I’m no Sudsy Monchik — five-time World Champion — but I can hold my own, maybe a little bit more.

Anyway, I’m just about to wrap up a match against my regular partner Bob, and there’s a knock on the little door to the court. Bob and I exchange looks: we’re both thinking the same thing.

Sure enough, the little door opens and a big-shouldered guy in a blue suit sticks his head in the door. He’s got a little wire spiraling out of one ear.

“Tranquility’s got winners,” he says firmly, and then he closes the door again.

“Tranquility” is Barbara Bush’s Secret Service code name, one of the few that reveal the Service’s under-rated gift for irony. Because Bob and I both know that when Bush comes into the court, she will come in like a Category-5 hurricane — a Cat-5 hurricane in pink athletic shorts.

And that’s all for Bob: he just about hands me the match, deliberately driving shots into the floor just to get it over with.

And as Bob exits through the tiny door, Mrs. Bush takes his place, ducking into the court, and then rolling her shoulders and cracking her neck. She’s stocky but everything beneath that snow-white hair is sheer, high-definition muscle.

There’s no need for introductions. No doubt her people have nosed around the courts for a few weeks, setting this game up. So she knows my name, my serve, my weaknesses.

I know that my only chance is to work her back and forth across the court, try to use my thirty-seven-year advantage in age as much as possible.

“Serve,” she says, and I do.

If you’ve never tried racquetball, it’s played in a closed room with a high ceiling, and all of the surfaces are in play. Young players hit hard, and run around a lot; but older players — especially those with really, really low centers of gravity like Barbara Bush — they make a science out of occupying center court, and playing angles all day long.

And play me she does. Every time she hammers the ball behind me, it caroms back from some wicked angle I haven’t expected, and all I can do is run faster to try to make up for each misjudgment.

Again and again she outthinks me on the angles, and finally I’m too exhausted to compensate any more.

That’s when she takes me out with a series of quick, punishing serves, just straight to the wall, like rifle shots.

I’m sitting on the floor, gasping for air, when she tosses me the ball. I’m too tired to catch it, and I take the little rubber sphere right in the chest before it dribbles away.

She ducks down to go out the door, but then the white curls pause and swing back. “I heard what you wrote about my boy,” she says, giving me a look.

Then the door slams shut, and it’s quiet in the court. And I realize that George W. Bush may have gotten all three of his names from his father, but the machismo and the angles — that was Barbara all the way, baby, all the way from the cradle itself.

♣♣♣

May 30th, 2007:
Exponential Chaos: The One Memorial Day Story You’ll Never Hear on Memorial
Day

How’s it going in Iraq? Sometimes a single story says it all. A story that’s held
for a day, but still.

Yesterday, insurgents brought down an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter with small arms fire, killing both pilots. By “small arms,” the Army means heavy machine guns used very precisely to bring down aircraft.

Nothing small about them, really.

And once the Warrior fell to earth, a rapid-reaction force consisting of two Bradley Fighting Vehicles was almost immediately dispatched.

Both Bradleys were then hit individually by separate roadside bombs. Each lost three soldiers at the scene; tallies may rise. Both Bradleys were destroyed.

The hulk of the Kiowa chopper was later blown up to prevent it falling into the wrong hands.

Think about it: the original chopper was outmatched by small arms fire, and required a rapid-reaction force to throw caution to the wind in coming to its aid.

Each Bradley in that rescue force subsequently required its own rapid rescue force, as well as a team to destroy the Kiowa. Ultimately we had something like five separate teams dispatched to aid survivors, cordon off the wrecks, and attempt to pursue suspects at the various scenes.

Exponential chaos.

And of course yesterday was Memorial Day. And these were not even the only US casualties Monday, just one spectacularly revealing incident in one particularly revealing day.

Staggering.

♣♣♣

January 7th, 2006:
VDB Reader Cracks Wise

One of our most regular readers — let’s call him the Don — on how to
distinguish between the various wars we seem to be fighting:

“The only political point I’ve been making lately is to anyone who tries to equate the war on Terrorism with the war in Iraq. Here’s the scorecard if you do:

“Number
of
attacks
by
Iraqi
terrorists
on
Americans
before the invasion: 0

“Number
of
attacks
by
Iraqi
terrorists
on
Americans
since the invasion: 5,000 - 10,000, pick a number.

“As
Dr.
Phil
would
say:
How’s
that
been
working
out
for
you?”

No one can frame it up like Don. No one.

♣♣♣

May 29th, 2007:
Ethnic Cleansing is So Passe

Ah, kids and their changing fads.

Back in the day — during the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, say — we used the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to refer to the systematic terrorizing, routing, murdering, and scattering of distinct ethnic groups.

The phrase carried a whiff of genocide, and that was purposeful. Because by and large we were against ethnic cleansing.

Of course, times have changed somewhat. The Bush administration has been turning a blind eye to institutionalized Shiite attempts to cleanse Baghdad for quite a while now.

But the phrase “ethnic cleansing” remained a problem. Until yesterday, when the New York Times supplied a more neutral and workable variation:
“Sectarian displacement has become widespread across Iraq, with Shiite and Sunni militias trying to rid neighborhoods in Baghdad and other cities of members of the rival sect.”

Sectarian displacement. Now there’s a policy you can bring home to Mom.

♣♣♣

June 27th, 2009:
Is Mark Sanford An Even Worse Parser Than John Edwards or Bill Clinton?
Depends What The Meaning of Is Is

Is Governor Mark Sanford capable of speaking or writing a line of prose that does
not reveal him to be an even more mendacious and desperate hair-splitter than we’d previously believed? It always depends, of course, what the meaning of is is. But doubtful. Today’s proof is in the press release, speaking to his use of state funds to visit the South American mistress. Read it and weep, Bill Clinton and John Edwards: “While the purpose of this trip was an entirely professional and appropriate business
development trip, I made a mistake while I was there in meeting with the woman who I
was
unfaithful
to
my
wife
with.”

Not just “professional” but — unfaithful non-wife sleeping mistake aside — “entirely professional and appropriate.” Brilliant. Just brilliant. This guy’s a keeper, on the Palin comedic level.

Mark VDB’s words.

♣♣♣

April 29th, 2009:

The Coming of Bill Baroonth
(At a national press conference) Sen. Patrick LEAHY (D-Vt.): “But we knew [about the Jeffords switch] in Vermont. We knew it long — apparently long before anybody down
here. It was well talked about. I see Bill Baroonth here from Vermont. He knows
everybody was talking about it before it happened. And it wasn’t a case — I mean, the
Jeffords, the whole family, a long line of distinguished members of the Republican Party,
but it was too much and he left.”

That’s right, baby: Bill Baroonth was in the house. How proud, how justifiably
proud, my mother, Mrs. Baroonth, will be tonight.

♣♣♣

August 26th, 2009:
One Final Bad Photograph of Ted Kennedy

Snapped this picture of Ted Kennedy last summer, at the Democratic National
Convention in Denver, on August 25th, exactly one year to the day before his death. Not the best picture in the world, not a Leahy-class photograph, but when I hauled it out of storage this morning it reminded me of the speech he gave. Not the best speech either, his voice cracking occasionally, but full of the old Kennedy rhetorical force. What I most remember is how grateful I was to Kennedy at that point, for throwing his weight behind Obama’s candidacy, for giving it the Camelot seal. It was crucial, I still believe, and distinctly generous. Rest in peace, Senator.

♣♣♣

June 3rd, 2008:
The Great Unasked Question about Condi

Far be it from us to create tawdry mystery where none exists, but as we wait for
the results from Montana and South Dakota it’s probably worth asking the obvious: what precisely is Condi Rice doing in a dimly lit motel room with the members of Kiss? That’s it, people. Just asking.

♣♣♣

September 26th, 2008:
Maverick Sarah Palin Reforms Existing National Borders: Russia and Canada Now
“In the State That I Am The Executive Of”
Don’t want to belabor this, especially as we agreed to rise above politics and suspend
irony until the bailout goes through, or at least until dinner time, but it’s really too good
to pass up. Katie Couric bores in on Sarah Palin’s much-mocked claim to foreign policy
experience via proximity with Russia, which she’s never visited:
COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.
PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our– our next door neighbors are foreign
countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia– COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the
Russians?
PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We– we do– it’s very important when
you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where– where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is– from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to– to our state.

♣♣♣

September 9th, 2008:
Condi Rice a Tad Miffed? Who Knew?

Shades of Bill Clinton being asked if Obama will be ready on Day One: Condi is
asked whether Palin has the right stuff, or only the Right-wing stuff, and offers a line that makes Clinton seem positively enthusiastic. Palin, explained Rice, is “a governor of a state here in the United States.”

♣♣♣

February 8th, 2008:
VDB Rogues Gallery Round-Up: Santorum and Romney to Launch New
Pythonesque Broadway Show, “Smarmalot”; Big Joe Lieberman Savaged by
Mangy Yaller Dog

All of VDB’s favorite folk are in the news, in ways we could only dream about.
Case in point: only days ago, Rick Santorum endorsed Mitt Romney’s gimpy campaign, and only moments ago Mitt scrubbed the whole effort. Hard to imagine a clearer cause and effect relationship: a man who lost his Senate seat by 18% performs a public laying on of hands, and poof! you’re a really huge loser too.

But that’s not all. Big Joe Lieberman had an utterly harrowing morning: first, he was pre-emptively stripped of super-delegate status for endorsing the man now presumed to be the Republican nominee; and second, he was attacked by a rabid yellow dog, who licked off the last remnants of his Democratic face paint.

Shocking, truly.

♣♣♣

January 17th, 2008:
Dateline Saudi Arabia: George W. Bush Discusses Fetal Position, Raising
Diplomatic Hopes Across War-Torn Middle East

During a sit-down at one of the myriad royal palaces of Saudi Arabia, George W.
Bush was asked about his current poll numbers, which have now sagged beyond historic lows and into uncharted, sub-Nixonian negative waters.

The President responded with the gravity we have come to expect during diplomatic missions abroad: “What am I supposed to do, go into a fetal position because of your polls?”

Actually, the reverse: we thought the polls might finally nudge you into coming out of the fetal position. But that’s just us.
Never mind, everybody. Carry on as before.

♣♣♣

January 7th, 2008:
Douglas Signs On For 10,000 Years in Iraq

No one holds a candle to (Vermont Governor) Jim Douglas when it comes to
timing. This is a man with an almost preternatural feel for the moment, a gift for the instant to strike. Take his endorsement of John McCain, announced this past Sunday, January the sixth. Just two days after McCain said it would be “fine” with him if American troops were still in Iraq in a “million years.” No satire, folks. That’s McCain’s new line.

Of course McCain had backed off some by that Sunday, telling CBS’s Face the Nation, “I don’t think Americans are concerned if we’re there for one hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years.”

See the genius of Jim Douglas? He waited until McCain fell back to the more reasonable figure of 10,000 years — waited until McCain backed off the less realistic 1,000,000 year projection, that is — and then struck while the endorsing iron was hot.

And that shit, as Brad Pitt said to Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise, cannot be taught.

♣♣♣

January 12th, 2008:
Never Mind: Obama “Imaginary” All Along

An anonymous Hillary advisor explains the difference between Obama folk and
Clinton folk to the Guardian: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”

Photo: Senator Patrick Leahy

Not sure which pisses me off more: the arrogant, dismissive nature of the comments, or the fact that apparently I was standing and jabbering to myself in a field down in Norwich, moving my hand up and down in empty air like a freaking idiot, while onlookers mocked me behind my back.

And Pat Leahy knew all along, and never said a word.

♣♣♣

November 21st, 2008:
MN Voter Leaves Cryptic Tribute to Failed Presidential Candidate and Lizard
King

Much of the political world is abuzz today with good news for the Franken camp
out in Minnesota: after picking up a good chunk of votes in a single recounting session yesterday, something like 20% of the lead Coleman now holds, Franken aides seemed to feel that the outlook was brightening substantially. But that was only half the buzz. The other half concerned the lizard people.

You’re looking at one of the challenged ballots in question. You’ll note that it would seem to state two preferences: one for Franken, and one for “lizard people.” Enough to confuse any optical scanner.

So the issues, with this particular ballot, seem clear enough.

One, whom did the voter finally prefer, Franken or the man-lizard(s)? Two, why, after going to the trouble to write in a man-lizard, did the voter in question have second

thoughts about blackening the reptilian box next to their handwritten entry? Was the
lizard-thing in question suddenly too frightening a choice? If so, why so?

And three, if the man-lizard(s) was/were the intended candidate, how to attribute said vote? That is, which candidate can most credibly claim to be the spawn of human and lizard, and hence the recipient of the much-contested vote?

Beats the hell out of VDB.

♣♣♣

January 11th, 2007:
The Foreign Policy Implications of Ground Hog Day: Why Bush Is No Bill Murray

Some posts just write themselves. You simply need to sit back, unwrap a
pomegranate bran muffin, and let them.

And that’s what we had planned to do this morning: run a still from Groundhog Day, alongside the complete lyrics of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.”

That was it.

Any further commentary on the President’s escalation speech last night would be pointless, we thought.

But we’re sticklers for metaphor here at VDB, and finally the comparison between Bill Murray’s recurring Punxsutawney nightmare and George W. Bush’s maddeningly unvarying script on the War in Iraq seemed, well, specious.

Sure, Murray wakes up each morning in hell, precisely the same hell, down to the most minute detail — and so do we. Bush’s New Way Forward is neither new nor forward (although it is, arguably, a way).

But the difference between the two is the plot arc, and of course Ground Hog Day has a brilliant one, although it’s tied thematically to sameness and repetition and the endless loop of human self-blindness.

Once he realizes that time is not moving forward, and may never move forward again, Murray reacts like a spoiled child. He pouts, he shouts, he goes mad with power, and then finally he slides into a deep, lightless despair.

And then something happens: Murray learns, in a word. And by learning, he grows, and his capacity to feel expands correspondingly.

Danny Rubin’s script shows Murray finally using his endless eons in Punxsutawney to great human advantage: he comes to know all of the small tragedies that can strike a small city in a single day, and painstakingly he builds up a single, heroic routine that can unstrike them all.

Boy falling from an oak tree; caught. Man choking on a bolus of food; Heimliched. Drunk dead of exposure or alcohol poisoning or old age or all three; still dead — because when all is said and done, some things are beyond the power of humans.

And so Murray learns grief and humility as well. And for a screwball comedy, it plays with more than a touch of authentic emotion.

Sprinting around a town he originally despised, guardian for a host of townspeople he originally patronized, Murray is all of the things this President will never be: humble, self-aware, and newly determined to avoid not simply the petty mistakes of the past, but the grand mistakes of the future.

And that’s what Americans wanted last night, during Bush’s oddly mechanical speech — it’s what they still want from the new Democratic Congress. Someone who

knows that a boy is right now losing his balance in the oak tree, pin wheeling his arms.
Someone who will sprint forward and catch him, save him.

Not someone who will let the boy fall to the sidewalk, and then send twenty thousand more just like him up into the branches. ♣♣♣

May 11th, 2009:
On That “Doomsday Strategy” To “Blow Up” The Edwards Campaign? Cry VDB a
River

Until recently, the Edwards affair/love-child scandal had produced only one of the
most ludicrous bits of self-justification in American political history: Edwards’s admission that he did have sex with that woman, but only in the narrow window of his wife’s remission from cancer. But now, suddenly, that number of absurdities has doubled.

Apparently, former senior Edwards campaign staffers, the folks who knew their candidate was cheating on his cancer-stricken wife one minute and emoting about poverty the next, are telling the press that there was a “doomsday strategy” in place, an inner circle plot to “blow up” the campaign if it were somehow to catch real fire.

In other words, these folks were not craven political hacks but principled plotters, willing to take down their own handiwork to save America from the threat of an Edwards Presidency.

How long, Lord, how long? How long will these half-bright lickspittles trouble the nation?

We’re supposed to believe that after years of planning and organization and monotonous toil and sweat, these well-connected and ambitious staffers would

deliberately sabotage the whole enterprise if, and only if, it looked as though it might
actually result in cushy White House jobs for one and all? Please.

To point out the obvious, if they were unwilling to pull the plug when the campaign was limping along, it’s all but impossible to see them acquiring a group conscience if it had begun to soar.

They were well-paid, and they decided to remain well-paid, until such time as they could be well-paid no longer.

This sort of desperate revisionism is always distasteful. But again, as in the case of Edwards’s own cheating and lies, this particular bit of storytelling sours even more when you consider that it wasn’t just John Edwards plotting to conceal a semi-public affair from his cancer-stricken wife.

It was a conspiracy. A small conspiracy, but a conspiracy just the same. And no amount of earnest tattling to George Stephanopoulos will ever change that fact. Ever. ♣♣♣

March 2nd, 2009:
BREAKING NEWS: Santorum Apparently Still “Latin for Asshole”; Film At 11

It would be tough to dislike anyone more than VDB dislikes former Senator Rick
Santorum. It’s an ambient dislike, as well as an ideological disagreement, similar to that which VDB experiences at a Ben Affleck film. But since Santorum’s thumping at the ballot box in 2006, we’ve been oddly lonely, with no one to mock with that same level of relentlessness. Except Big Joe Lieberman, of course.

But not to worry: here’s old Man-on-Dog himself, seconding Rush Limbaugh’s call for Obama to fail. Remember, the question is being posed at CPAC, the reddest of conservative red-meat environments, and so Santorum responds initially with bravado: “Absolutely.”

But watch him walk it back almost immediately in his own sweet, craven, pathetic way. It’s enough to bring tears to your eyes, like coming home again.

♣♣♣

November 25th, 2007:
In Fairness to Leprechaun Dennis Kucinich

Dan DeWalt of Newfane is a 100% certified stand-up guy, but whatever you do,
don’t sign the guy up as your campaign communications director. Here is DeWalt, defending Dennis Kucinich in Sunday’s Rutland Herald: “He’s the only one talking about impeachment in the campaign,” DeWalt said. “But just
because he is a little short, squeaky and admits to once seeing a UFO, he apparently has
been eliminated from being a serious presidential contender.”

Apparently so.

♣♣♣

December 5th, 2007:
Santorum Sets Diligently to Work on String of Narrow, Flatulent Columns For
Paper That Presciently Labeled Him “Doofus”

We would be remiss if we didn’t cover the breath-taking news out of
Pennsylvania last month: values-champion Rick Santorum began a weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. You might expect that Santorum’s maiden effort wouldn’t be worth your time. And you’d be right, in almost every way but one: the first several grafs could easily have been written by VDB. A delicious excerpt: “Odd.” It is, indeed, odd to write a column every other Thursday for a paper that used
that very word to describe me. Actually, odd was one of the nicer terms used in The
Inquirer to describe me. Imagine these words next to your name in your high school
yearbook — disingenuous, snake oil peddler, smug, arrogant, chicken-livered, intolerant
and fatalistic.
And most of those labels were in news stories.
My new employer also claimed not so long ago that I “inspire contempt” and “have lost
my mind” and that my actions bore a remarkable resemblance to Joe McCarthy’s. You
know? The namesake of McCarthyism.
At the time, I took solace from the implied compliment. At least The Inquirer thought I
was making a substantial mark on my generation. Not bad for someone they also called a
“doofus.”

— Rick Santorum, 11/8/07

♣♣♣

October 10th, 2007:
In Which Bernie Saves the World

You’ve probably heard that starting next summer, Americans will need passports
to get in and out of Canada. Even if you just slide over the border for a quick smoked meat sandwich — papers, please.

And honestly, the prospect has left New Englanders heavily bummed. Because let’s face it: we have some issues with authority up here.

So when Michael Chertoff flew in to Burlington last week to offer a compromise, I was all ears.

And the pitch sounded good: instead of a passport, Chertoff said, Vermonters will be able to apply for something called an “enhanced driver’s license” — a license containing a radio-frequency computer chip.

Of course the ACLU has challenged these RFID chips because they allow the wearer to be easily tracked. But Chertoff pointed out that I could save about 40$ bucks using an enhanced license instead of renewing my passport.

Bingo — I was sold.

Now, the enhanced Vermont licenses are part of a very small pilot program. And it turns out that even a small pilot program needs its own micro-pilot program, or at least

that’s what Chertoff told me when he called to offer me my very own enhanced license,
way before anyone else on the list.

In fact, the only other people getting one were Bernie Sanders and some Quaker anti-war activists, but Chertoff said the pilot-pilot program had to start somewhere.

So last Saturday, I get the enhanced license in the mail, and I’m not gonna lie to you: it was an emotional moment. I’m a guy who’s always wanted his driver’s license to be all it could be, and here it was, shiny, smart, holographic. I drove down North Avenue feeling like the bee’s knees.

And then my back pocket started talking.

At first I couldn’t make out the words, just muffled sounds. But the weird thing was they were sounds with a thick Brooklyn accent.

And that’s when it hit me: somehow Bernie’s radio ID chip had crossed frequencies with mine, and I was picking up his voice with my wallet.

And obviously his wallet was picking up mine, because when I said, “Bernie?” there was a pause, and then I heard Bernie say, “Phil, is that you? Look, apparently they’ve sold us a bill of goods with these driver’s licenses.”

I was about to agree with him, but Bernie went on. “Phil, look out the windows of your car. Do you see any police cruisers?”

Sure enough, when I looked I did see what looked like unmarked police cars, way back in traffic.

“They’re all around me,” I told Bernie, trying to direct my voice toward my back pocket, which — if you’ve never tried to do it while driving — is really hard.

“This is a huge problem,” Bernie said, “huge. I’m also being followed. They’re all over me like white on milk. We only have one hope. And you have to trust me, Phil.”

So when Bernie told me to drive to the King Street Dock, walk onto the commuter ferry for New York, and flush my license down the ship’s toilet, that’s exactly what I did.

By the time I’d snuck back off the ship, the unmarked police cars had all been loaded on, and when the ferry sailed for New York, the men in black sailed with it.

I sat down on the dock, and a minute later, Bernie sat down too, and we watched the ferry angle out toward the Adirondacks.

“Now neither of us has even a normal driver’s license,” I pointed out.

But Bernie held up a finger. “True. But we do have our passports. And you know what that means.”

I shook my head, and Bernie said, “No matter what happens with Montreal, Phil, we’ll always have Paris.”

♣♣♣

June 2nd, 2007:
Bob Woodward, VDB Has Misjudged You

I’ve been re-reading Bob Woodward’s 2002 Bush at War
recently. Why? Maybe to try to understand how one mainstream reporter could produce so fawning a tribute to so deficient a President, and in that way become a rotten synecdoche for the way the entire establishment bought the Administration’s post-9/11 hokum.

But there was one passage that must have escaped me the first time around. Because it’s impossible to believe that I wouldn’t remember it, that I wouldn’t have quoted and used it before now.

It’s the story of Bush throwing out the first pitch in the third game of the 2001 World Series.

This was just days after the launch of the attack on Afghanistan, when Bush’s approval ratings were in the stratosphere. The passage was written out of an interview with Karl Rove, who was at the game that night.

The date was Tuesday, October 30.

Writes Woodward:

The President emerged wearing a New York Fire Department windbreaker. He raised his
arm and gave a thumbs-up to the crowd on the third base side of the field. Probably
15,000 fans threw their arms in the air imitating the motion. He then threw a strike from
the rubber, and the stadium erupted.
Watching from owner George Steinbrenner’s box, Karl Rove thought, It’s like being at a
Nazi rally.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is not the observation of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore or Bill Maher. This is the first thing that popped into the mind of the President’s own political director.

This man immediately saw an echo of German fascism, and then went on to frame the coming mid-term election in stridently authoritarian terms, targeting even helpful Democratic Senators as weak on terror.

Rove liked what he saw, in other words, liked it a lot. Unreal, when you think about it.

Or very, very real, when you think about it twice.

♣♣♣

August 22nd, 2007:
BREAKING NEWS: Bill Murray Faces Jail Time for Slow, Drunken Golf-Cart
Driving, and No, This Is Not A Drill, People

Okay, look, we kid around here at VDB a great deal, perhaps too much. But
occasionally a story surfaces that demands not only a straight face but a sober hand, and a grim attention to the time-honored Ethics of Journalism.

Fortunately, this isn’t it: Bill Murray popped for DWI, while operating a golf cart at extremely low speeds through the early morning streets of Stockholm.

We say again: a golf cart. Roger that.

According to CNN, “Police officers spotted the 56-year-old actor-comedian early Sunday in the slow-moving vehicle and noticed he smelled of alcohol when they pulled him over, said Detective-Inspector Christer Holmlund of the Stockholm police.”

Murray refused a breathalyzer test, but then allowed a blood test and signed a document admitted to driving while under the influence. Not exactly a stonewall strategy, but then Murray may be crazy like a fox. Continues CNN, “It isn’t illegal to drive a golf cart in city traffic in Sweden, but Holmlund said it is very unusual.”

At the risk of pointing out the patently obvious, was this story tailor-made for VDB or what? Bill Murray, Sweden, golf carts?

Thank you, Jesus.

And of course, you as well, Dalai Lama.

♣♣♣

February 6th, 2007:
Judy Giuliani Humanizes Her Big Testosterone-Factor Man Real
Good

You don’t read too much about Rudy Giuliani here at VDB, and there’s a damn
good reason for that: in about 8 months or so, Rudy’s vaunted lead in the polls will simply melt away like a September frost.

Never before in the history of American Presidential politics has a man been propelled so far by so slight an illusion.

Why can’t Rudy’s lead hold up through the Primary process? Don’t get VDB started. But if you must know, hold your nose and page through the New York Post’s interview today with the lovely and candid Mrs. Giuliani.

Our favorite snippet: “What people don’t know is that Rudy’s a very, very romantic guy. We love watching Sleepless in Seattle. Can you imagine my big testosterone-factor husband doing that?”

Frankly, we can’t. And equally frankly, we still can’t believe she was referring to Rudy Giuliani.

For the sake of argument, stipulate that Rudy Giuliani single-handedly saved New York City on that fateful morning, and, by extension, America’s immortal soul. Has

anyone in America — Republican, Democrat, Red State, Blue State — ever thought of
Rudy as a “big testosterone-factor” type of guy?

With the comb-over and the well-established taste for Off-Off-Broadway cross- dressing?

But it gets worse: Judi goes on to describe her man as “the Energizer Bunny with no rechargeable batteries [sic].”

From the mouths of babes.

♣♣♣

June 7th, 2007
BREAKING NEWS: Woman Stares at Dog, Bill O’Reilly Desperate for Video (No
Joke)

Yesterday, the Times-Argus brought you one of the more bizarre stories in
modern memory, the saga of one Jayna Hutchinson, who, until recently, was facing jail time for staring cock-eyed at a police dog.

That’s right. On the night of July 31 last year, an inebriated Hutchinson approached police officers investigating a brawl at a West Fairlee “establishment.” Police officers told Hutchinson “bluntly” to bug off. Hutchinson failed to bug off.

And that was when she stared in a “taunting/harassing manner” at the K9 member of the unit.

Animal cruelty charges were filed, and then, thanks to a State’s Attorney with a modicum of common sense, charges were quickly dropped.

“‘After looking at the video, I did not think it was worthwhile proceeding,” Orange County State’s Attorney Will Porter said Tuesday.”

Which would be the end of the story, if another mongrel hadn’t gotten almost immediately involved.

That mongrel would be Bill O’Reilly.

Apparently O’Reilly’s staff is keeping a very sharp eye peeled for the stray unflattering story out of the Green Mountain State.

Within hours, the public defender in the Hutchinson dog-staring debacle also had mail from Fox.
Wrote Kelly Green on the Defender General’s email list: Dear Defenders,
Fox News wants the video of my client making faces at the police dog. What’s your
advice to us?
Thanks,
Kelly Green
Want VDB’s advice, Kelly?

Take the film of Hutchinson staring down the dog to video wizard Bill Simmon. Have Bill splice in various photographs of loofas and falafel for 1/3000 of a second at five-second intervals. (We recommend the 7-inch “raw loofa” at Webvitamins, for only $2.40, and falafel from Mamoun’s Falafel on MacDougal Street in New York.)

Then comply with the Fox request without further ado.

Within moments of the footage airing, O’Reilly’s tiny audience will feel strangely compelled to eat healthy and bathe regularly.

In short, if that audience insists upon swallowing propaganda night after night after night, nothing says that the propaganda they swallow can’t benefit the rest of society.

♣♣♣

November 17th, 2006
Tyson Begins Work as Male Prostitute; Santorum to Follow, Say
Sources

RawStory is reporting that former heavy-weight champion Mike
Tyson — currently bankrupt — will soon begin a second, edgier career track: as a male prostitute.

Heidi Fleiss has opened a “Stud Farm” in Nevada, for women only, and she clearly means to use poor but notorious beefcake to give the ranch an initial PR boost.

Coming on the heels of OJ’s new “If I Did It” gambit, Tyson’s decision proves anew that there’s always a second act — even after your third and fourth acts have crashed and burned.

And in only apparently unrelated news, “Extra Crispy” Rick Santorum — fresh off an 18-point loss in his Senate re-election bid — announced today that contrary to all logic and overwhelming public demand, he will not seek the Presidency in 2008.

“Absolutely, positively not,” Santorum told a talk-show host yesterday. “Absolutely not,” he added then, as though someone had objected.

And VDB has no doubt what that means: it’s only a matter of time before Ricky signs on with Madame Fleiss as well, and offers America’s risk-taking women something they’ve always privately desired, and never publicly admitted.

Four seconds of foreplay, followed by four minutes of sex, followed by four hours of moral recriminations, and an infomercial on the need to privatize Social Security.
Santorum: Latin, for “You know you want it, sexy beast.”

♣♣♣

October 10th, 2007:
Turkish Troops Prepare Own War on Terror

Since late May, Turkish troops have been massing on the northern Iraqi border,
and the Turkish government has been telegraphing a limited incursion, nominally to put down Kurdish rebels but clearly to firm up their general Iraq negotiating posture as well.

Today, the Turks are making it official: they’ll pretty much roll in whenever they please.

And like all horrific developments, look for George Bush to cite the Turkish threat as proof of the need to station 150,000 Americans in Iraq until 3025.

Making bloody lemonade out of a batch of Turkish lemons, as it were.

♣♣♣

May 23rd, 2006:
Lloyd Bentsen Has Died

Some people — regardless of whatever else they may have done or
failed to do — latch on to a piece of your heart with the act of a single moment.

That’s the way I feel about Lloyd Bentsen, running mate of the ill-fated Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Bentsen produced the only Vice Presidential debate knock-out I’ve ever seen live (although Dick Cheney beat up pretty heavily on Joe Lieberman in 2000). If you missed it, or if you somehow managed never to hear tell of it, the moment went like this:

Dan Quayle had been asked several times about his qualifications not simply to be Vice President, but to be President in the event of a catastrophic emergency. Quayle’s answer is a model of puffery, and couldn’t demonstrate any more clearly his basic ineptitude — throughout the debate he asserted that he would be “on a first-name basis” with world leaders and functionaries in the White House, and this would make all the difference.

And Bentsen’s answer is so devastating that it went on to become a political byword, a generic put-down for any political poser.

Here’s the relevant part of the transcript, not quite the same without seeing the spooked look on Quayle’s face after he gets tagged, but still very, very satisfying. Quayle: Three times that I’ve had this question — and I will try to answer it again for
you, as clearly as I can, because the question you are asking is what kind of
qualifications does Dan Quayle have to be president, what kind of qualifications do I
have and what would I do in this kind of a situation. And what would I do in this
situation?
I would make sure that the people in the cabinet and the people that are advisors to the
president are called in, and I would talk to them, and I will work with them…
I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of
this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he
sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush
administration, if that unfortunate event would ever occur.

Judy Woodruff: Senator Bentsen.
Bentsen: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was
a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy. [Prolonged boos and applause]

Of course, it was Quayle who went on to the Vice Presidency, but from there he became a global synonym for stupidity; Bentsen, for his part, went on to be remembered as the man who delivered the most withering political put-down in history.

Not a bad outcome, given the options. Rest in peace, Lloyd. That was a big pitch you hit.

♣♣♣

April 3rd, 2008:
The Cold Realities of Financial Aid

Five years ago, my older brother died very suddenly, at age 42. His fourteen-year-
old son, my nephew Craig, was devastated. But his bond with his mother was exceptionally strong, and with a lot of love from the extended family, Craig made it through the crisis.

Financially things were very tight, though: Craig’s mother was disabled by an extreme form of Lupus, and she couldn’t work. So their entire family income came from Social Security, of one form or another.

Still, Craig managed good grades in high school, and when it was time to look at colleges, I helped him navigate the university admissions system. I don’t know a lot about a lot of things, I figured, but I do know something about going to college. I teach at UVM, and I advise students every day about courses and transfers and internships and a billion other things.

But it turned out that I knew nothing, really, about the part of college that matters most: the financial aid system.

On the drive to Craig’s new campus in New York, I told him I was sure he’d be offered complete funding for his four-year education. No one could demonstrate greater need, I thought, and surely need would be the imperative.

And when we’d finished our session with the financial aid counselor, she smiled and told us the good news: Craig would receive the maximum the University offered in terms of financial aid.

Then came the bad news: the maximum aid package each year would leave Craig a gap of some $30,000 at the end of four years. This gap would take the form of mandatory loans that even the most impoverished kids must sign.

There has to be some mistake, I said. This is a kid with good grades, no father and a permanently disabled mother. No family income at all. None.

The Counselor was empathetic and even personally contrite, but the fact remained: the best Craig could hope for was already on the table.

That one thirty-minute meeting opened my eyes forever.

The costs of a four-year education are vastly too high, and getting higher; the credit burden we’re currently placing on the children of low- and middle-income families borders on the criminal.

And it was right around the time of that meeting that I began to pay a little more attention to some of the initiatives coming out of the office of our freshman Congressman, Peter Welch.

Welch has been far from idle on this front, it turns out. Along with the rest of the Democratic caucus, he pushed for what is now known as the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, which at once raised the amount needy students can get in the form of grants, and cut the interest rate on the amount they must take in loans in half.

But increasing scholarships and reducing interest means nothing if colleges and Universities consume the savings with tuition increases. So Welch has gone at the problem the other way as well: he managed to pass an amendment mandating that colleges and universities report to the Dept. of Education exactly how much of their endowment is reserved each year for containing costs to students, including tuition.

With greater transparency, Welch argues, will come increasing public pressure for all institutions to aggressively lower tuition rates.

Both of these moves struck me as common-sensical, and long over-due. And as is so rarely the case with legislation out of Washington, both spoke to me in clear terms about things that I now worry about every day.

Especially these days, because two months ago Craig’s situation got worse in the only way possible: his mother died of inoperable cancer, and a quick call to his financial aid counselor confirmed that it wouldn’t affect his financial aid status in the slightest. ♣♣♣

March 18th, 2008:
Stand of Birch

In August of 2001, after my wife, my three-year-old daughter and I had finished
lugging all of our possessions into the house where we now live, we all sat on the front steps cooling off. It was hot, but a beautiful, moving-in-day sort of hot. We looked out over the lawn and we decided then and there that it was missing something crucial: birch trees.

So we immersed ourselves in birch trees for a week: river birch, weeping birch, European silver birch. But after all that, we finally went with the sort we’d both had in our yards growing up, white paper birch.

And at a tree nursery in out in Colchester we found just the pair we wanted, with an unexpected side benefit: a much smaller third tree growing right in next to one of the larger two. That small tree had a big gash at the base of its trunk, though, and the nursery owner said we could have it for free, but it probably wouldn’t last out the winter.

We loved it, though, and we took that grouping of trees home and planted them and then we stood there — our daughter Gwendolyn holding Annika’s hand, and Annika holding my hand — and the three of us looked at the three of them. It was an uncanny moment of recognition.

Annika and I exchanged a look, but neither of us said a word out loud, because we’re superstitious, and the little tree might not make it through the winter.

Still, I taped it up the best I could, and come spring the little birch seemed fine. By the end of August, the wound at its base was surrounded by a tough circular lip, and you could tell that the injured part was now as tough, if not tougher than any other part of the tree. My wife and I were happy to have the whole family of trees thriving, but still we didn’t say anything, not for almost seven years, because you really never know.

You never know, for instance, that an ice storm will single out one of your trees, and leave all the others alone.

Last week, that’s exactly what happened: we woke up to find everything sheathed in ice, the house, the car, the trees and bushes, everything glittering and silent and unharmed, except the smallest of the three birch. For some reason, it was overpowered with ice, lying almost horizontally along the ground, the branches reaching right up to the front door.

And I ran out and found that there was nothing I could do — no amount of knocking or scraping would shatter the ice. The only way to remove it was to cut the tree itself, which I couldn’t bring myself to do.

So for three days it lay almost broken before the door, and for three days we looked at it helplessly from the kitchen window. Finally the sun came, and the temperature rose a bit. Nothing to write home about, but enough to weaken the ice, and we were able to work the largest clusters of it away with our fingers.

Then, with a pair of pruning shears, we eventually cut its crown loose from the earth, and it took a day or two, but it slowly rose back up into the air. And suddenly there were three again, the father birch, the mother birch, and their paper-white child.

Only later that night, talking it over, did my wife and I admit out loud that we saw them that way, as ghostly images of ourselves. It’s not that we’re not superstitious anymore, because we are. It’s because we realized that superstition won’t keep your children safe. Only love, and a full lifetime of worry, can accomplish that. ♣♣♣

VDB HEADLINES THAT BITE LIKE A DOG, HIT LIKE A HEAVYWEIGHT,
COULD MAKE BUSTER KEATON LOL AND WILLY LOMAN SING ON AN
ELEVATOR

As promised above…
MCCAIN N.H. CAMPAIGN NOW “ON FIRE,” FOLLOWS LIEBERMAN WITH
NOD BY KISSINGER, LOCKING DOWN ELDERLY WAR CRIMINAL VOTE
DISTRAUGHT OVER LATEST IOWA POLLS, MCCAIN TURNS TO BFF
REVEREND JERRY FALWELL, ONLY TO FIND FALWELL IRREVERSIBLY
DEAD
BIG JOE LIEBERMAN “DENIES WAR-MONGERING,” ALSO
CATEGORICALLY DISPUTES SIGNIFICANT DISTINCTION “BETWEEN
SHIT AND SHINOLA”
SCHWARZENEGGER NOT PISSED HE CAN’T RUN FOR PRESIDENT.
SERIOUSLY. HE’S NOT. SERIOUSLY.
GEORGE BUSH TALKS TRUTH
BREAKING: NEWLY DECLASSIFIED GLOBAL WARMING PHOTOS SHOW
BUSH NOT AS HONEST AND FORTHCOMING AS PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED
BILL OPENS CAN OF RHETORICAL WHOOP-ASS
CLINTON LAUNCHES SCUD AT WIFE’S CAMPAIGN
TIME HAS TOLD: EDWARDS NARROWLY NIPS CLINTON FOR MOST
EGREGIOUS IDIOT AWARD
BUSH LEANS TOWARD “SURGE”; IRAQI POLICE RESPOND BY PICKING
NOSES WITH U.S.-MADE EQUIPMENT
YOU WANT PROOF THAT GOD EXISTS? EVANGELICAL HOMOPHOBE
OUTED JUST IN TIME FOR THE PRE-ELECTION SUNDAY SHOWS
RICK SANTORUM IS A WEE WINSOME THING
SANTORUM HITS RECORD LEVEL OF DUMB

SANTORUM UNIQUELY DESPISED
AH! VDB LOVES THE SMELL OF SANTORUM TOASTING IN THE
MORNING
SANTORUM, BABY HUEY, AND THE LIMITS OF METAPHOR
AFTER TWIN LOSSES, SANTORUM & HARRIS TO WED AND PRODUCE A
CLUTCH OF HUGE, FRIGHTENING, SANCTIMONIOUS OFFSPRING
VDB ROGUES GALLERY ROUND-UP: SANTORUM AND ROMNEY TO
LAUNCH NEW PYTHONESQUE BROADWAY SHOW, “SMARMALOT”; BIG
JOE LIEBERMAN SAVAGED BY MANGY YALLER DOG
COULD THE PROPER NOUN “SANTORUM,” LONG TRANSLATED AS
“LATIN FOR ASSHOLE,” SOON COME TO MEAN “PRESIDENT” IN THE
KING’S ENGLISH? NOT IF VDB CAN HELP IT, FRIENDS
SANCTIMONIOUS HYPOCRITE ALERT: TURNS OUT SANTORUM MAY
HAVE HELPED ENSIGN NAVIGATE CHOPPY WATERS OF INFIDELITY
AND COVER-UP
VDB’S RIGHT FOOT INJURED IN LIEBERMAN ASS-KICKING; TEAM OF
PODIATRISTS WORK THROUGH THE NIGHT; BUT WHAT A NIGHT
VDB’S LURID AND SHOCKING CONFESSION: “I HOOKED UP WITH
BARBARA BUSH AT THE SHERATON HOTEL — ON MY LUNCH HOUR!”
SCALIA CAUGHT SULKING IN DORKY WHITE SHORTS
MICHAEL GOLDFARB EXPLAINS THE SARAH PALIN PICK USING JANE
GOODALL, MATING GORILLAS, AND HIS OWN EXTREMELY LARGE
BRAIN
WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, WHY DO BARACK OBAMA AND HIS
HENCHMEN SO DESPERATELY WANT TO KILL SARAH PALIN’S BABY,
TRIG?
BRISTOL PALIN AND HAYDEN PANATTIERE TEAM UP TO EITHER FIGHT
OR PROMOTE SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE OR ON THE FIRST DATE, NO
BIGGIE
PALIN TO ANNOUNCE RESIGNATION SOON; A NATION REELS, AS OIL
AND WOLFSHOOTING HELICOPTER STOCKS END DAY IN TAILSPIN;
ANALYSTS TRACE PALIN “FUNK” TO STRAY VDB COMMENT;
PUBLISHER WEEPS

BREAKING: PRINCE HARRY RISKS DEATH, CAMERA-FLASH EXPOSURE
IN AFGHAN DESERT
FINAL DC POST AND THE COMING OF BILL BAROONTH: SPECTER
SWITCHES PARTIES, VDB DISCLAIMS INSIDE ROLE AS BIDEN’S
“MUSCLE”; WELCH AT WHITE HOUSE WITH PROGRESSIVES; WE’RE
TIRED AND WILL BLOG NO MORE TONIGHT; YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO
HOME, BUT YOU CAN’T STAY HERE, ETC
LEWINSKY SAGA NOW A MAJOR MOVIE; OUT OF RESPECT FOR
PRESIDENCY, ROGER EBERT AGREES TO DISCONTINUE “THUMBS WAY
UP” RATING

And…

Novak Cracks Like April Ice

Schwarzenegger Folds Like Cheap Suit
US House Race 2006: Media Bogarts Rainville Kool-Aid
Cheney Parties Like a Big Dog — Not

Faulted for Ignoring 41’s Advice, Bush Makes Holiday Push to Become
Own Dad

Bush Mocked by Immense Puppets

Bush Begins Severing Fingers

After Shooting Own Foot, Rainville Aims Higher

Tarrant in Meatloaf-for-Votes Imbroglio

We Torture Because We Love

Presumed Incontinent: An All-New Brian Dubie Thriller!

Burlington Dems Masticate, Deliberate

POLITICAL BARBEQUE ERUPTS ON NORTH BEACH; Officials Unable to
Count the Injured and Disoriented; Welch Communications Director Hospitalized
for “Percussive Gastric Event”; Odum Also Lost; Oh, The Humanity, the
Humanity!

Dead Governors to Sleep with Fishes?

Rainville on Iraq: Pay No Attention to Your Television Screens, For They Lie

Lieberman Mistakenly Re-Ignites Pants, Not Senate Campaign

VERMONT DAILY BRIEFING VOTED 2006 “BEST VERMONT BLOG”;
Analysts Credit Site’s “Whining and Begging” in Dark-Horse Win; $250 K Prize to
Fund Network of Blogger Convalescent Homes

Sources: Vermont Business Coalition PAC Now Officially as Popular as Herpes

In Your Face, Simon Callow: VDB Officially Changes Blog Handle to “Vermont
Idol”

Fox Jettisons “Fair,” Then “Balanced” — But Holds Firm on Keeping the “And”
Cue Up Maureen McGovern: Bruised Democrats Finally Escape S.S. Poseidon
Clinton Camp Jelly-Legs After Obama News

Now for the Counter-Counter Intuitive: Obama Running Strong with Black Voters

Bill Richardson Sends Up Signal Flare: I Have Access to Enough Cash to Smother
the State of Rhode Island

Coulter Ups Ante, Adds Sympathetic Words for Abortion Snipers to Gay-Bashing;
Caledonian-Record Covers Lipstick Costs

Another Bullet in the Administration’s Heart (Which Would be Rough, If They Had
One)

Isn’t “Affordability Tour” Really an Oxymoron, When You Think About It?

Rove Savaged and Pelted With Trash by Well-Read, Birkenstock-Wearing
Hooligans; Oh, The Humanity, The Humanity

Bush “Bird-Poop” Video Emboldens Enemy

Bill Lofy Pens Anti-O’Reilly Op-Ed, Receives “Factor” Invitation Hours Later;
Unable to Clean Hands after Repeated Washings

Wolfowitz Loses Top Aide, Will Carry Own Comb for Last Nine Days at World
Bank

Richard “Dick” Cheney Brings Down the Hammer, Accidentally Producing Highly
Classified Damage to Own Testes

Considering the Merits of Being the Dominican Republic: At Least We’re Not
Uzbekistan

Class Action Suit Targeting “Shumlin Whiplash” Goes Forward in Superior Court;
Thousands Claim Necks “Fucked Up Real Bad” By Oddly Abrupt Policy Reversals

NRC Chairman Dale Klein at a Loss to Explain Rash of Teeth Marks on Buttock to
Wife: “All I Heard Was a Low Savage Roar, and I Saw This Wild Shock of White
Hair” (Bernie Sanders)

Sanders Update: Vermont Yankee’s Bad Week Now In Eighteenth Straight Bad
Week

Howard of Australia Given Bum’s Rush; Begins Forced Walkabout By Declaring,
“Krikey! Should Have Thrown That Drongo Bludger Bush Right in the Damn
Dunny”

Dennis Kucinich To Fight No More Forever

Chuck Norris Elevates the Tone of the Primaries — Right Up Romney’s Butt

NYT Takes Issue With Own Endorsement

Bill Sets Out on 1000 Mile Walk From Hillary’s Attack Dog to Obama’s Soulmate

BREAKING NEWS: Grumpy Grampa (McCain) Ushers Scamp of a Daughter
(Sarah) Into Katie Couric’s Office So She Can Say Her Sorries

BREAKING: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Gaffes Inexplicably Picked Up by
Both Parties, and Adopted as Offical U.S. Policy

Joe the Plumber Details His Disgust For the “Appalling” Craven Creature That Is
John McCain, And Coming From Joe The Plumber, That’s Really Saying
Something

WTF!?!: VDB Puts In Two Or Three Nice Words About A Republican, For Once

BREAKING NEWS: GAY MARRIAGE PASSES; Heterosexual Marriages
Tottering; Polygamy And Incest Bills Moving Quickly Through House And Senate;
And VDB’s Own Marriage Comes A Cropper. Really.

One James DeFilippi Revealed To Be “Don,” VDB Accomplice and Noir Crime
Author

The Sinatra Question: What Will Dubie Do?

Shepard Initiates Second Doomed Run

Post-Partum Elation: Some Loose and Disconnected Thoughts on Campaign 2008
and the New Presidential Politics
Apparently VDB Became Drunk Last Night

How Do I Live Without You (George)?

Passengers Locate Your Airsickness Bags: Jeb Bush Already in the Running

VDB Just Threw Up a Little In Own Mouth

Edward R. Murrow Rolls in Grave

♣♣♣

Philip Baruth is a novelist and a regular commentator for Vermont Public Radio. Along with two Vermont Associated Press awards for commentary, he won a national Public Radio News Directors Award. His satiric pieces have won a 2009 Edward R. Murrow Award in the Overall Excellence and a Public Radio News Directors Award.
The New York Times selected his novel, The X President, as a Notable Book of 2003; the
Washington Post described Philip and a small handful of others as “the newer new
generation” of up-and-coming writers. His latest novel, The Brothers Boswell, is a literary thriller.
Philip lives in Burlington, Vermont, and has taught at the University of Vermont since 1993. He has earned a B.A. at Brown University, and his Ph.D at the University of California, Irvine.
The Vermont Daily Briefing has been in operation since September, 2005. It was voted the state’s “Best Political Blog” in 2006, 2007, and 2008 by the readers of Seven Days, the state’s largest alternative weekly.