This Is

brilliant and this is disgusting.

Houston And Galveston

missed the bullet again. Tropical Storm Bill dumped lots of rain on New Orleans and is headed for Alabama and the Florida panhandle. But it's only a matter of time before we catch a really big storm in this area. Tropical Storm Allison almost wiped out Houston a couple of years ago. But the last big hurricane was Alicia in August, 1983. This area has seen such a huge increase in population and building since then that a strong category 3 or bigger storm would, in my opinion, cause devastation.

Hillary's Book As Per P.J. O'Rourke

IF YOU PLAN not to read this summer, "Living History" is just the book. Hillary Clinton's new memoir is more than 100,000 pages long. At least I think it is. There are only 562 page numbers, but you know how those Clintons lie.

Boring others is a form of aggression, and Hillary attacks her public with the weapon of brutal dullness. Ms. Clinton has led a busy, meddlesome life from an early age.

Compared with Hillary Clinton, Bill is a big pile of humility. "While Bill talked about social change," says Hillary, "I embodied it," to loud hosannas and wild exaltations.

IN FACT, Hillary and her husband aren't representative of much of anything American. Neither can drive a car. Hillary hasn't been behind the wheel since 1996. ("I cajoled my lead [Secret Service] agent, Don Flynn, into sitting beside me. . . . Don's knuckles were white as dice by the time we arrived.") And Bill should never try. ("He has so much information running through his head at any given moment that he doesn't always notice where he's going.") In nearly twenty years of family life, the Clintons did not own a home or go to the mall without armed guards. And when they had a cat and dog, "I had to set up a separate correspondence unit . . . to answer their mail."
Hillary serves roasted eggplant soup and sweet potato puree to Jacques Chirac and doesn't get the joke when Chirac says, "Of course, I love many things American, including the food. You know, I used to work in a Howard Johnson's restaurant." After listening to Jiang Zemin explain that the Tibetans had been liberated by the Chinese, Hillary concludes, "I don't think Jiang . . . was being quite straight with me on Tibet."

HAS "LIVING HISTORY" been dumbed down for its intended reader? Yes, assuming its author read it. I don't doubt that she wrote part of it, but no one seems to have read the final text.

The purchasers of "Living History" can count themselves benefited, also. They could have had Hillary as their legal aid defender instead of merely their senator. Her argument to the jury that "rodent parts which had been sterilized might be considered edible in certain parts of the world" would not be of much use in a felony narcotics trial, despite the admirable multiculturalism of the sentiment.

However, it says something unflattering about our era that prominent political figures--who used to write declarations of independence, preambles to constitutions, Gettysburg addresses, and such--now use the alphabet only to make primitive artifacts, like the letter-inscribed tablet that Charlemagne is said to have put under his pillow each night, in the hope he'd wake up literate.

And last but not least:

They failed. And that is, ultimately, what makes "Living History" such a good nonread. If they're going to throw the book at us, and the book is by Hillary, the republic will endure (and the Republicans will prevail).

Read the whole thing here.

Tropical Storm Bill

is beating up the central coast of Louisiana this evening. This is a prime example of how fast these things can form and move ashore. Last Saturday night it wasn't even a depression. By 10 AM Sunday morning, it was showing circulation and had winds of at least 40 MPH. One saving grace was its forward speed at anywhere from 10 to 13 MPH. This didn't give it a lot of time to churn up to hurricane strength before making landfall. NWS was giving it a track almost directly into Galveston bay on Sunday morning. I'm not wishing anything bad on our Cajun brothers but better there than here.

The Killer Ds

are at it again. They ran off to Oklahoma during the last legislative session to stop the Republicans from redistricting the state. And, oh yeah, costing the taxpayers a lot of money in the process.