Thursdays with Tina: We Don't Mean Any Harm, Really, It's All in Good Fun Edition
This hurts us more than it hurts you. Translating Tina Brown:
Tina-speakWhat it meansWhen Joe Lieberman got voted off the island Tuesday night. . .I don't care if Maureen's already used it. Step off, ok?. . . it was a relief to say goodbye to that mild, admonishing fist.Admonish me no longer, fist of moderate scolding! There comes a point when humiliation is excruciating to watch.Thankfully, none of you seem to realize that."Think of it this way," political consultant Joe Trippi told me. "If I came to you with 25 of your closest friends carrying a black box with red buttons on it and said, 'We have all looked for the best person to take care of this box, and we've decided that the only one who can protect it is you. If anything happens to it, if you lose it, the entire planet blows up.' Most of us, I mean 280 million of us, would say, 'No! I don't want the goddamn box anywhere near me! Take it away!' Yet every four years a bunch of seven or eight guys come out screaming, 'Give me the [expletive] box!'"I have finally found someone whose metaphors are even more impenetrable than mine. Allow me to quote him at length.[Dean] ejected [Trippi] two weeks ago in the wake of the New Hampshire debacle, [and Trippi's] still vibrating from the intensity of boom and bust.My metaphors are actually quite transparent. Penis!"There's always that crashing, horrible moment when it's all gone," [Trippi] told me on the phone . . . after living through the crashing, horrible moment when -- though he still wasn't ready to admit it -- it's all gone.I have no idea what it would be like to live through such a massive failure to live up to expectations. No idea at all.When Dean was 21 percentage points ahead . . . Kerry faced down the abyss. The somber ecclesiastical face began to crack like a mask. Only when Kerry became the riverboat gambler who rolled the dice in Iowa could voters clearly see the riverboat fighter who stood tall in the Mekong Delta.I think I'm having an acid flashback."[Clinton] was feisty but still big," Stephanopoulos said. "There was no sense of shrinking."Does Levitra have a 1-800 number?[After] John Edwards's round of private dinners in New York last year . . . [people thought he] would be pulp under Karl Rove's battering ram.Mmmmmm. . . battering ram. . .