Posted on 01/27/2004 8:39:52 AM PST by mikeb704
The joke goes like this. A guy hires a new secretary. The first thing he does is call her into his office and says, "There are two words I don’t ever want to hear from you. One is swell, and the other is lousy."
The woman dutifully jots this information down in her steno book and says, "Oh, OK. What are the words?"
I thought of this the other day when I read a Los Angeles Times story. The article reported that Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had gone duck hunting together.
There’s a case before the Supreme Court that involves the vice president. The newspaper quoted a couple of legal authorities who believed questions of a possible conflict of interest could be raised.
Experts on legal ethics – who even knew there was such a thing? – can hash out that dispute. What was interesting was the letter Justice Scalia sent to the Times about his trip.
In it, he wrote: "The duck hunting was lousy. Our host said that in 35 years of duck hunting on this lease, he had never seen so few ducks." On the plus side, however, "I did come back with a few ducks, which tasted swell."
Now Mr. Justice Scalia is probably the smartest person on the court. He could have used a great number of flowery terms, the sort that lawyers use much of the time, whether they understand the meaning of them or not.
But no. The hunting was lousy and the ducks he managed to bring back tasted swell. That’s refreshing.
So was the emergence of a presidential candidate’s wife who doesn’t seem to worry much about what voters might think. She lives her life, it appears, the way she wants to.
Howard Dean self-detonated in Iowa last week. He explained in his "I Have a Scream" presentation he "was trying to pump up 3,500 kids who gave me three weeks of their lives . . ." Two of those kids, standing right behind him in stage, were a 64-year-old senator and a 61-year-old former congressman. They sure looked pumped up. Like they wished they were a million miles away.
So what does a guy do when he gets himself into a mess? He sends for his wife, of course.
Mrs. Dean’s been notably absent from her husband’s campaign. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times welcomed her most charitably: "In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled. . ."
It turns out that Mrs. Dean isn’t all that interested in politics. She missed a couple of her husband’s inaugurations as governor of Vermont. She doesn’t have cable TV at home, so she doesn’t always see her husband debating the other Democratic candidates.
Dr. Dean has her medical practice and her son’s high school hockey games and her twice-a-month meetings to discuss mystery books. She thinks her career and her life are just as important as her husband’s.
Still, she took time out last week to administer CPR to Howard’s dying race for the White House. In an interview on ABC’s Primetime, she claimed she didn’t remember the last time she saw her husband lose his temper.
Since she hasn’t seen all that much of him in recent months, that’s a reasonable statement. Mrs. Dean really rose to the occasion with a later question, one asking her if she wanted to do the interview on Primetime.
My guess is many if not most political wives would have bounced back with something like, "At this crucial time in our nation’s history, it’s essential that we elect only the best person and you need to know my husband is that individual because he, and he alone, blah, blah, blah."
That’s not what Judy Dean said. Her answer was direct: "Howard asked me to do this interview, and I did."
Truthful. Direct. Unpretentious. The gal is so unslick that when she introduced her husband at a Sunday rally, she read from a laptop.
We could do a lot worse for a First Lady than Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean. Instead of trying to take over the country’s healthcare, as a recent White House spouse tried to, she’d be satisfied to provide healthcare to her patients.
Like many men, Howard Dean married above himself. I think Dr. Judy will be overjoyed when she can return to her normal way of living. It won’t be long now.
LOL!!! Good one!
We have come to expect nothing but hypocracy from the left and they never fail to deliver.
And counting.
You know, that's the part I never got either.
Oh, no. More killing of life just for the hell of it? I'm disappointed in Scalia. I keep forgetying, pro-life only pertains to humans, not to any other form of life - and only to the pre-born, not to those already alive. What was I thinking???
Sorry, I can't help you. Still trying to figure out which word is swell and which one is lousy.
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