[« Trivia answers....] [Renteria Watch, Day 2 »]
12/15/2004: Thought for the Day:
Do you remember the golden age of Republican antimaterialism? If you blinked, you missed it. It surfaced for a few months in 2000 in order to counteract Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's inarguable claim that the economy had boomed during the Clinton years. Oh, sure, Republicans answered. But what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? Clinton had presided over the Internet boom, but he had also presided over oral sex from Monica Lewinsky. As candidate George W. Bush put it in a now-forgotten campaign slogan, the nation needed "prosperity with a purpose." At the 2000 Republican Convention, Bush warned that prosperity "can be a drug in our system--dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty." Hmm. Is that why, as president, he's given us so little of it? (Prosperity, I mean, not oral sex.)
--Timothy Noah
Len on 12.15.04 @ 06:40 AM CST
