James Wolcott, the wonderfully bitter wit for Vanity Fair, mourns the loss of his investment portfolio...but at least there's a silver lining. As it sinks, so does the Republican Party.
He writes:
Even as I wave a farewell hankie at my investment holdings as they
sink into the briny deep, I draw spiritual comfort from seeing the
McCain-McWinky campaign unceremoniously drown with them. McCain could
still win, but the advance signs of rapid decay are everywhere in his
campaign, a death mask forming with rictus sneer that resembles a
silent snarl. I harbor no grand illusions about Obama, he isn't my
messiah (I don't have a messiah, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
supplying more than enough transcendence to last a lifetime), and I'm
still not sure how much he comprehends how gravely this country has
been gutted over the last decade. My rooting interest is less about
Obama himself than about how big a hurt he can put to the Republican
Party. I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I
want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling,
writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so
desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary
guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock
to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in
the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity.
I really don't think that's too much to ask, even in these frugal times.
The issue also includes some wonderful portraits by the incomparable David Levine, including one of, yes, the puppet master Dick Cheney and his favorite boy toy:
