Wednesday, December 29, 2004

 
From the Corner:
"DECLARE VICTORY AND LEAVE [John Derbyshire]
It was not, as I mis-said, Everett Dirksen who said (in regard to the Vietnam War) "Let's just declare victory and leave," but George Aiken. Thanks to a reader for that.

I predict you'll be hearing more and more of the "Aiken strategy" in the months to come...
Posted at 12:47 PM"
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Dirksen or Dzhugashvili?
Or: Aiken Breakin' The Hearts of Non-Communist Vietnamese?
Or: George "Koala" Aiken?

Hmmmmm, was it the former U.S. Senator from Illinois or the one-time seminarian from Georgia* who observed that, "A million murdered here and a million murdered there and a billion enlsaved there-pretty soon you're talking not about real tragedies, but statistics"?
And I suppose I could have included a banquet in the previous Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid take-off and referred to Cassidy's sideburnkick as "The Koala Kid" and engaged in some creative punctuation, noting that the latter was true to his press clippings description as someone who "eats, shoots, and leaves."**

*Later known, of course, as "Josef Stalin."
[**Reminded of that oldie by a recent (shudder)NPR interview of Lynne Truss, author of "Eat, Shoots and Leaves -A Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation." One of her peeves was the tendency of British grocers to use apostrophes incorrectly eg. "Apples'". Obviously, I'm not so good at punctuation myself, but don't recall examples of *our* merchants of meat 'n fruits making such errors. Reader's?(just kidding)-reactionry@aol.com or nromirror.blogspot.com]