Mugger

I haven't linked to Russ Smith in awhile. He's on as usual. This week he slams Gail Collins, Billy Crystal, Al Gore and Michael Moore:

Last Thursday night, on the occasion of my 49th birthday, the family went to dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant very similar to Tortilla Flats in Hampden, once a Baltimore bastion of bigots, faded "Wallace for President" posters and prodigious use of the word that blacks are allowed to use, but whites are not. I lived in the neighborhood one year during college and found it quite pleasant, aside from the stray drunk lying in the gutter who'd yell, "Get a haircut, fuckin' fag!"

And this:

Like 99 percent of the audience last Saturday (all white faces, by the way, in this city with a black population of almost 70 percent), Nicky loved the film, more for the technique and jokes than political content. He did, however, buy the Halliburton lie that Moore peddles, which caused me far more tsouris than the Red Sox getting pasted by the Phils that afternoon.

What the hell. My longtime friend Polar Levine, an artist in Tribeca who wears a ponytail below his shaved head and is politically to the left of Noam Chomsky, once, during a baseball game, made a terrifying prediction. "Listen dude, when our kids (they're the same age) are changing our diapers, Nicky will be a socialist and Nile will be the equivalent of Pat Buchanan."