DanKohn.com

I’m off for 2 weeks whitewater rafting through the Grand Canyon, the longest I’ll have been away from email since 1990.

Michael Kinsley on journalistic cliches: “Sentiment belongs in a special category, along with partisan differences, of things that exist primarily to be put aside. When sentiment and partisan differences are put aside, there is room for good will and reason and common sense and maybe even a small refrigerator where cooler heads can prevail.”

The most fundamental coginitive dissonance in how the Bush Administration sees (as opposed to talks about) the world is on the question of democracy. Realpolitik says that democracy-lovers are a bunch of wimpy goo-goos (good goverment types). I believe, as does an NYT editorial today, that “Terrorism will retreat where democracy advances, not where autocrats muzzle political expression or buy peace at home by financing violence abroad.” That is, supporting democracy is, counter-intuitively, the essence of real-politik, and that American interests and security will never be assured until the whole world consists solely of democracies.

Damning detail about English men:
What Is it About British Men? Cheap, Drunk and Stiff Lipped:

“Since moving to London, my romantic life has been characterized by last-minute text messages, incomprehensible drunkards, first-date coke bingers and split bar tabs,” Ms. McLaren, who clearly had better luck at home in Canada, wrote in the magazine. Describing a series of disastrous dates with a series of disastrous men, none of whom laid even a finger on her, she concluded that most English males suffer from “glaring sexual insecurity” and secretly prefer the company of other men.

The author, “Ms. McLaren was not the only foreign woman who has hoped for Mr. Darcy, only to be saddled with Austin Powers.”