John Kerry is Not Smart / "Lincoln's Tomb" / Bernard Goldberg / "The Unabrian Manifesto"

Whatever is wrong with federal Republicanism – and there’s quite a bit wrong with it – you will never hear a Republican utter these words: “You know, education … if you make the most of it, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

That was John Kerry, speaking in California the other day on behalf of Democratic candidate for Governor, Phil Angelitis. The spin is that Kerry was joking about Bush, saying – in his own inimitable fucking fashion – that someone who got virtually the same grades as Kerry in graduate school is just dumb enough to get us involved in Iraq.

When was the last time you heard about a dumb liberal? Oh, in the strictest sense, they’re scattered hip deep throughout Washington DC; hither and yon across American campuses; working inside out, like termites, in the vast majority of the news media. But you never hear of them, at least not in the context of their being as stupid as Bush who, unless I’ve mislabeled the outside-of-policy objections, is at the greatest fault for his innate inability to lie as fluently as did Clinton when the cameras were on.

Jesus Christ, Kerry, pull yourself together. It’s not bad enough that you’ve hitched yourself to the RMS Angelitis as it begins its maiden voyage (only to skid alongside the iceberg and sink on 7 November), but then to denigrate the service of those men and women who are, truly, the innocent bystanders in your ongoing battle against Bush puts you squarely in the camp of people we should thank God we didn’t send to the White House. You’d be well served to save your troop bashing for those quiet dinner parties in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, where it will do no harm to either your already bullet-ravaged reputation or your party.

Re: Lincoln’s Tomb. The gravy research – i.e., the things I can find without going too far out of my way – has mostly come to an end. So in advance of difficult research, I have sent emails to Lincoln historians (soliciting their advice), the Lincoln museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana (closest to home; as to whether they have materials on hand relevant to my book), and have isolated dozens of items (collections, books, and microfilms) at the University of Notre Dame’s library, some dating back to the 1870s, that I either know for a fact or believe with reasonable certainty will aid my efforts. These are just preliminary steps, of course, but other than ordering some books I’ve long neglected, the easy stuff is finished.

I am dreading having to set up camp at Notre Dame, and so am delaying the first day for as long as logic allows. At first blush, it appears as though work at ND could continue throughout most of the winter. While the idea of befriending some bright, nubile young coed occupies a small, warm spot somewhere in the very back of my mind, there is nothing else that recommends spending so much time there. But off we go, sometime much too soon.

Go to brianwise.com – there’s no website there yet, but you can see a front page, and read a quote about me from Bernard Goldberg: “[Brian S.] Wise is a gem: smart, funny, and merciless when it comes to nailing the morons in our culture."

That is not a joke quote. Goldberg wrote me a very brief email following my mentioning him in the essay “Ann Coulter is Right,” and we traded emails for a time before he ended up with a digital copy of my book, The Unabrian Manifesto. I asked, if you like the book, please send along a blurb. What you see there is the second half of the blurb he forwarded along. A week or so later, we spoke on the phone for about 30 minutes several weeks ago; he seems like an all right guy.

For someone like me, it pays to befriend someone like Bernard Goldberg, but I don’t quite know how to go about it, so I tend to leave well enough alone. You would think people like Goldberg have better things to do…. At least I do, which is why I leave well enough alone. But it was still a nice thing he did, and it’s much appreciated.

By the way. Having recently re-read The Unabrian Manifesto, I still don’t hate it. But I did find three mistakes, and so I’m giving some thought to issuing a first anniversary edition, where those mistakes would be corrected, some additional notes made, and so forth. But it’s just a thought.