The New Guard

What a welcome change in the White House: Read the New Yorker:




http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_cook

(click)


And then there is Christoper Hitchens' Take on Obama. Clever, witty, acid, and interesting:

Books January/February 2009 Atlantic

Our new president has a feline’s legendary nimbleness and luck—but there are downsides to being a cat.

by Christopher Hitchens

Cool Cat

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Image credit: Jim Young/Reuters/Corbis

I have a small wish of my own in this season of public and private Utopias. It is that the emergence—or should I say ascendance?—of Barack Hussein Obama will allow the reentry into circulation of an old linguistic coinage. Exploited perhaps to greatest effect by James Baldwin, the word I have in mind is cat. Some of you will be old enough to remember it in real time, before the lugubrious and nerve-racking days when people never knew from one moment to the next what expression would put them in the wrong: the days of Negro and colored and black and African American and people of color. After all of this strenuous and heated and boring discourse, does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? A “cat” also, in jazz vernacular, can be a white person, just as Obama, in some non–Plessy v. Ferguson ways, can be. I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. (Think, for one thing, of the kitten-like grace of those daughters.) The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché, which is that cats have nine lives—and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.

Dreams From My Father

by Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press

The Audacity of Hope

by Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press

The Case Against Barack Obama

by David Freddoso
Regnery Publishing

Toward the beginning of his second book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama displays the modesty that is one of his many engaging qualities, attributing his victory in his very first U.S. Senate race (all the way back in 2004) to “my almost spooky good fortune.” This understates matters to a huge degree. click below for the rest:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/hitchens-obama


Can't wait 'til Tuesday...

Jameson