In the Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay makes fun of Rex Ryan. Certainly worth reading.
Meanwhile the Giants are facing a tough fight against the Packers this weekend, in Green Bay. Wouldn’t victory be sweet?
“I like to be able to fire people who work for me.”
—Mitt Romney. Who may just be capable of losing this race after all.
I’m deeply sad this morning to hear of the death of Tony Blankley, Newt Gingrich’s former press secretary, of cancer at the age of 62.
You might be surprised to hear this coming from me; I’m not an admirer of Gingrich’s.
But I used to know Tony Blankley quite well. After Gingrich left office, Tony went into the media, and one of the things he did was write a column on conservatism for George. I was Tony’s editor. (This was actually Tony’s start in print media, a fact the Times omits in its obituary.)
Tony was, quite simply, a lovely man. He was sophisticated, thoughtful, passionate, courteous, learned, warm and funny. He was a man of deep conviction, but he also believed that people of differing partisan opinions should be able to listen to and learn from each other. (He was far more temperate than his former boss.) It’s safe to say that, when Tony joined the staff of George in 1997, many of us there weren’t quite sure what to make of him; though we were committed to the idea of being a non-partisan magazine, most of the staff at George didn’t know a lot of Gingrich Republicans and probably didn’t want to. Tony charmed everyone; he loved being a part of the magazine, loved working with young people, believed in the power of civilized words to shape important conversations. He was impossible not to like.
Tony had a smart and beautiful wife, Lynda, whom he was absolutely crazy about, and three children whom he adored and he lived on a farm surrounded by animals; if I remember correctly, the number of dogs in the household ran at or close to double-digits. He loved Gilbert & Sullivan; I still remember the time Tony wanted a column titled in a way that played off the Pirates of Penzance song, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and how horrified he was when I didn’t catch the reference.
Tony was also a loyal man, something I knew first-hand; in the midst of all the controversy about the book I wrote on John Kennedy, he wrote me a letter of support that gave me an immense lift during a very difficult time. While not denying Newt Gingrich’s faults, Tony was rock-solid loyal to his former boss, a fact I found hard to understand but admired nonetheless. Loyalty is a quality that seems to have faded from our public life, but Tony displayed its virtue.
After his time at George, Tony went on to become editorial page editor at the Washington Times and a regular on the McLaughlin Group. I fell out of touch with him, unfortunately; his life and mine were taking very different paths. But I have always felt that my life was enriched by having known and worked with Tony, that I learned far more from him than he from me, and I’m sure that many, many other people feel the same.
WashPo reports he’s fallen into a tie with John Huntsman for 4th place in New Hampshire, due, in part, to dislike of his opposition to gay marriage. Who’da thought that?
My prediction: Huntsman will do better than expected.
Why do I say this? Because he’s the last candidate who hasn’t enjoyed an unexpected surge in the polls. He’s due!
Here’s yet another reason why the Giants are better than the Jets in every respect: Their captains don’t get in fights with the rest of the team and then sulk on the bench like a little boy.
As the Times reports:
“I could not conceive of chaos breaking out in Eli’s huddle,” [backup quarterback David] Carr said after Giants practice Thursday. “It’s not in the makeup of the team or the leaders we pick. In our locker room, we value people who don’t call attention to themselves. So people find leadership in Eli’s understated manner. It’s real and earned.”
…Asked to describe the Giants’ leadership model, Manning winced. Introspection is not a strong suit either, at least not publicly….
These are the kinds of values that I like in people and football teams and politicians, and I think our society and our planet generally would be better if they acted more like the New York Giants.
Then, conversely, you have the Jets, whose physically unhealthy coach boasts every year of winning the Super Bowl—then doesn’t—and posts semi-pornographic videos of his wife on YouTube. (Which, I’m sorry, is just weird. Whatever you’re into at home, who cares, but…YouTube-ing it?)
As a not-that-great-but-on-the-whole-good man once said, The fish rots at the head…
And as a result, you get behavior like a Jets coach tripping an opposing player running down the sideline, and one of the team captains quits on the team in the middle of their most important game of the season, and the Jets lose, lose, lose!
And not only that, but they do it in a way that diminishes our great country and everyone in it.
If you love your country and hope for a better world, you have no choice but to root for the G-Men against Atlanta tomorrow.
(Sorry.)
Nikki Finke reports on a forthcoming documentary of Jerry Garcia.
One tries not to, but it’s hard these days, with an inundation of news about the Iowa caucus and anticipation of New Hampshire. Despite George Will saying of Rick Santorum, “Suddenly, a fun candidate“—seriously? Rick Santorum? I wanna party with you, George Will!—my own suspicion is that nobody really likes any of these people.
(Which is possibly why the Journal’s article about Michele Bachmann’s exit from the race is the paper’s most read story today.)
We now have left Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and in my view the guy with the best/only chance of beating Obama, who will never be nominated, John Huntsman. With the exception of Huntsman, who mostly seems sane and generally thoughtful, this is a dreary group, the weakest group of GOP presidential candidates in my lifetime. In that sense, they are a perfect reflection of their party generally.
And to be honest, I think that’s too bad—the country could use a healthy, serious debate between the two parties. It’s not like Obama has been a perfect president. (Though it’s fantastic that he’s appointed RIchard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the infuriated howls of Republican protest. Smart policy, smart politics.)
Instead, who knows what all the Republicans are talking about? “Taking back” our country and Obama’s “socialist policies” and “repealing Obamacare on day one” and such. I guess you play to your base in these primaries, but what if your base is a bunch of dyspeptic idiot zealots?
On the left and the right, a couple folks agree with me. In the New York Post, John Podhoretz blamed the abundance of televised debates for for boosting the candidacies of buffoons like Bachmann and Herman Cain. (Remember him? Weird, right?)
Debate Hell provided terrific copy for pundits, led to record ratings for cable-news channels, and helped enshrine Twitter as the news flavor of the moment. But it made the Republican Party look foolish and silly, not serious and sober in facing the problems of the present with solutions for the future.
And in the Times, Thomas Friedman says kinda-sorta the same thing, in his own Friedman-esque way.
Two things have struck me about the Republican presidential candidate debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses. One is how entertaining they were. The other is how disconnected they were from the biggest trends shaping the job market of the 21st century. What if the 2012 campaign were actually about the world in which we’re living and how we adapt to it? What would the candidates be talking about?
(One thing that struck me about the debates: The questioners were almost uniformly terrible, and had as much to do with the irrelevance of those debates to real life as the candidates did.)
So here’s my prediction, and you can quote me on it a year from now: Obama will win the election against Mitt Romney, who will prove a better candidate than many think, but without a mandate and without any compelling vision. You will never hear this from the networks and newspapers, of course, because they need to boost ratings and circulation and hope a presidential campaign can do it. (With this one, I’m not so sure.)
The races to follow that should be more interesting are the Senate and House campaigns….
As this trailer for a forthcoming documentary about a sloth orphanage in Costa Rica demonstrates….
I happened to see a sloth once in Costa Rica. It was up in a tree, and not moving nearly as much as the sloths in this video. In fact, it was not moving at all. It looked like a bunch of moss.
(Thanks to my cousin Lucy, who does all sorts of amazing work with animals, for pointing out this trailer.)
That’s what New York Giants Brandon Jacobs running back said last week to loud-mouthed Jets head coach Rex Ryan, who is indeed overweight and under-mature. And that is also what the Miami Dolphins just did to Ryan by beating the Jets, 19-17, and eliminating any chance they had of making the playoffs.
The Jets, whom Ryan has transformed into the most unlikeable franchise in the sport, are now officially a franchise in disarray, and it is a wonderful thing to see. The coach who annually brags that his team will win the Super Bowl will have to eat his own words. The quarterback who repeatedly underachieves continues to do so (he threw three interceptions today). The offensive coordinator will get the axe. (Maybe Ryan will too!) One of the team captains removed himself from the game with a couple minutes to play—apparently because the quarterback wouldn’t throw him the ball—and refused to watch his team’s futile attempt at a comeback.
For the Jets, this offseason is going to be hell.
How sweet it is…
Now…Go G-men!