Free Republic

Last year I examined the trend toward nationwide stupidity in two columns about the people I called "Ignos" and "Duhs." Now I ask you to turn your attention to yet another group of American folk heroes: the "Ughs." We live in stomach-turning times. Dial soap's "You're not as clean as you think you are" commercial shows a dog drinking from a toilet and then licking its owner's face. Folger's coffee has taken Maxwell House's "good to the last drop" pitch and rendered it literally: The Folger's drinker accidentally spills a drop of his coffee on the diner counter, then bends...

From the March 1999 American Spectator: Florence King's review of Ol' Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond by Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson (Longstreet, 359 pages). IN HIS 1969 BOOK, Gothic Politics in the Deep South, Robert Sherrill noted that Strom Thurmond lives in a world of metaphysical absolutes: "It is a world of one Eden, one Hell, one Heaven, one Right, one Wrong, one Strom." South Carolina's 96-year-old senior Senator is proof of the biblical injunction that the last shall be the first. No matter which way you slice him -- powerbroker of both major political parties...