We are so lacking in evocative invective that we are content to call Bush an idiot, Cheney a pig and Rumsfeld "deluded," Jane Smiley says with a sigh..
That's not polemic; THIS is polemic, she says, citing Sen. Hiram Johnson, speaking of Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the L A Times in the 1890s:
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"In the City of San Francisco, we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy; we have had vile officials; we have had rotten newspapers. But we have nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy.
He is one thing that California looks at when, in looking at Southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent--that is Harrison Gray Otis."
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That’s more like it.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060903/cm_huffpost/028636
Posted by Deck at September 4, 2006 10:23 AM