Weekend Update

An argument against the dumbing down of entertainment. This is the first time that four Pulitzer Prize-winning musicals have ever played on Broadway simultaneously. The honorees: SOUTH PACIFIC, A CHORUS LINE, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and RENT.

An argument supporting the dumbing down of entertainment. PROM NIGHT made 21 million dollars last weekend.

Lies, damned lies, and off-the-cuff remarks by the First Hubby. So is Bill Clinton subconsciously trying to sabotage his wife's campaign or what?

“But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated — and immediately apologized for it — what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up.”

Reading this reminds me of the Continental Op story where the Op is sitting in a bar and sees a sign that says ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN WHISKEY SERVED HERE. "I was counting the number of lies in that sentence," he says, "and had come up with five so far." And oddly enough, there are at least five in Clinton's sentence. One time ? Several times. Late at night? Afternoon. When she was exhausted? Nope. Immediately apologized? As if. 1995? 1996 actually. And can we please stop calling lies misstatements? Telling someone it's 7:30 when it's 7:29 is a misstatement. Telling somebody you apologized immediately when you waited a week to see if it'd blow over is a lie of Spitzerian proportions, okay?

That would explain the soulless part. And what kind of deal with the devil do the Clintons have that, when their side says something stupid, the other side will automatically say something just as dumb and take the heat off them? Case in point: Obama's remarks about what everyone is now referring to as "small-town American values:"

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This is the classic case of someone saying out loud what everybody on both coasts thinks about the middle of the country--that they're a bunch of gun-hugging Jesus-loving bigots who are only going to shoot more immigrants in the name of Christ as the economy gets worse. And of course the sad thing is that Hillary Clinton gets to defend small-town values by mimicking the accent of whatever town she happens to be speaking in this week, and John McCain has been handed another code word for Liberal come the general election. Can we just fast forward to the conventions please because the more these people talk, the more I don't want to see any of them getting a 3 AM phone call from anybody except a telemarketer.

Brain. Dead. I had planned to see Shine A Light and Priceless this weekend, but instead, I wrote the first two scenes of a new play, and if I carve out enough writing time from my out-every-night-this-week schedule, I'll have the long third scene by the end of the week. Wish me luck.