Short Cuts

Thursday, February 20, 2003

Talking Turkey: In the lull before the storm, Rumsfeld and Powell are eyeball to eyeball with the new Turkish government with Rumsfeld, the wordsmith, talking tough about "workarounds" to avoid needing the Turks permission to deploy troops on their border. For the billions we would save by calling Turkey's bluff we could send each of our 40,000 troops into Baghdad in their own custom built Gucci Hummers.

Working Class Hypocrite: Scroll down in the NYDaily News' Rush and Molloy for some Bruce Springsteen dish. The details of Springsteen's backstage demands are all on smokinggun.com (thanks for crediting our favorite site, you guys) and make for extraordinary reading: soft drinks in glass bottles only, buckets of beluga, crisp white linen everywhere, bodyguards for the band's guitars... you've come a long way, babies.

Poufter Power? Tina Brown, currently a power floater rather than broker, gets the half-frozen flounder across the frontal lobes from Andrew Sullivan for saying, in so many ill-chosen words, that the Bush administration isn't pink enough. What we found even more offensive was the implication that being brilliant pushes Condoleezza Rice over the androgyny line. Bad enough she's not "black enough" for liberals, now she's not woman enough. Them's fightin' words, Tina.

All This and Jewish, Too: Presidential candidate John Kerry goes full-pecs, in of all places, the new Vogue. Celebrity photog Annie Leibovitz (she's the celebrity - traveling under an assumed name with an entourage of 17) captures him at his 'sportiv' best. Seems Kerry is an uber-jock and excels at ice hockey, riding his Harley motorcycle, skiing, playing soccer, flying a twin-engine Cessna, and the highlight of his Yale career: running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. All of this with no damage whatsoever to his chin implant.

What Are They Thinking? Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe asks a simple question of the Suicide Marchers who gathered there last weekend to show us their bleeding hearts, their love of humanity and their disgust for killing. "Where were the Iraqis?" It seems the message being sent to people who have been hammered, tortured, maimed, starved and murdered for over a decade is simply "our pain is greater." Hopefully, Iraqi's will remember when they are free and safe in whose name they were liberated. It won't be Martin Sheen's...

-Your Dug Out and Nearly Dangerous LComStaff