the author
Just from the headline, I’d disagree if for no other reason, the waste a hell of lot more of my money.
the author
/johnny
Long article....a lot of superfluous stuff. Basically, I see DC as a cesspool of moral, ethical and political equivalence that is tied to power and gratification for the needing-to-be-pandered soul.
Nothing better that being a Congressman, Senator, Administration luminary hitting the town at night meeting nubile young groupie tramps who’ll screw you even if you are 60 - because you have ‘power’. Nothing better than getting your ass licked on Sundays on the TV ‘news’ shows where they’ll stroke your ego for something that betrays what you promised your constituents - you’re ‘bi-partisan’ blechhhh..
Nothing better than having your ass kissed by some WH staffer and a meeting at the WH where Obama puts the ultimatum to you - you’re just glad you can brag to the other pandering congressional losers the WH doesn’t think is important enough to pander to or intimidate. If you’re lucky enough, you might even get to play golf with that asshole! Glory be!!!! you hit the motherlode of irrelevance....
Screw all of you up there, even you nobody beltway and bureaucrat bottom feeders. You perpetuate an uncaring and severely harsh bloodletting of this country of which you know absolutely not one iota about. Were I God and I had my way, I’d find a “Lott” and go through the whole routine again.....bunch of damned traitors.
The DC elites are ever so much worse! I don’t run into the same level of hypocrisy in New York that I do in DC. The denizens of metro DC tend to cloth themselves in a self~righteous, monochromatic stew of pretentiouness. All think the same, have the same academic credentials, and are singularly uninspiring including basso profundo of the vermin ridden People’s House. I do like some on an individual level. Collectively, they are annoying.
New Yorkers are at least honest in their snobbery and their classism. Frankly, DC was, in the past small, insular and less interesting. Today, it is large, threatening and just as uninteresting.
Just sticking to that first sentence where he reveals where he's coming from: he starts out telling us that people were he lives aren't very interested in the new book about Washington, This Town, but then he goes on and on talking about the book in minute detail. Should have left it with, "people where I live aren't talking about the book, and that's not surprising" or something like that.
And you? Why post a massive putdown of a book that nobody's actually going to read?
Except that my town has a reason to exist.
DC? Not so much.
Well, that “must read” was a lot of sound and fury....
(You’re slipping, 2DV)
Less reality in DC than Disneyland.
Unless your town is sacramento
Nevertheless, what we have here is nearly as incestuous on another level - a review by one accredited member of Our Town's insiders about a book written by another, whose topic is the behavior of the rest of that school of parasitical fish, published in a favorite medium of the ruling class, The New Republic. It will, no doubt, do wonder for the book's sales, even if only because it will be irresistible for the nomenklatura to discover whether their personal clout garnered a mention in this list of luminaries, if that term can be tortured sufficiently to apply.
I am reminded of the fable of how the fox gets rid of fleas - he grasps a twig in his mouth and submerges himself until they are gathered there, at the last dry spot, and then he lets them go and swims off on his way. Washington DC - and yes, Upper Manhattan - appears to be the sort of place that gathers this infestation in times where the rest of the country is under water with respect to employment. If we could only just let them go off on their own self-serving, self-aggrandizing cruise to parts unknown the country, and the entire world, would be the better for it.
Every city has its flaws, but to suggest that Mos Eisley On-The-Potomac isn’t measurably worse than average in many ways is, well, deluded.
Term limits would fix the whole thing—but that’s too easy, natch.