Peter Krupa

For whatever reason, it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, which I suppose goes some way toward explaining the coverage of the seven frat boys and sorority gals who died in a million-dollar mansion fire over the weekend.

I haven’t ventured to turn on any cable news, and I don’t think I will, but the New York Times tells us that the victims were all would-be cancer curers who “took a few days off for a chance to spend a fun weekend with their closest college pals.”

Tragic.

But you know, I just can’t help but ask, since I have this inquisitive nature and all: What were 13 Greek boys and girls doing in that beach house on Saturday night that was so exhausting that seven of them didn’t wake up when the whole freaking house caught fire?

Roasting marshmallows? Singing songs? Sharing fond memories? Growing drowsy around the campfire while wearing their letters and nursing steaming mugs of hot cocoa?

Not that it matters so much. Seven people dead in an accident is sad regardless. But if the media wants to make this a national story, they might as well do their jobs and tell us what happened.

Why, the New York Times, of course:

“The reason that vajayjay has caught on, I think, is because there is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names like Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that,” Dr. McWhorter said. “It sounds warm and familiar and it almost makes the vagina feel like a little cartoon character with eyes that walks around.”

Oh man, I’m going to have weird dreams tonight.

Alec Baldwin. NATIONAL TREASURE.

From Slate.com:

Over the last two decades, the FDA has become increasingly open to drugs designed for the treatment of depression, pain, and anxiety—drugs that are, by their nature, likely to mimic the banned Schedule I narcotics. Part of this is the product of a well-documented relaxation of FDA practice that began under Clinton and has increased under Bush. But another part is the widespread public acceptance of the idea that the effects drug users have always been seeking in their illicit drugs—calmness, lack of pain, and bliss—are now “treatments” as opposed to recreation. We have reached a point at which it’s commonly understood that when people snort cocaine because they’re depressed or want to function better at work, that’s drug trafficking; but taking antidepressants for similar purposes is practicing medicine. 

I really want to like Ron Paul. Really, I do. It’s so nice to hear a Republican point out the ear-bleedingly obvious fact that the Iraq War is an ongoing disaster and we should leave. Now.

It’s so refreshing to hear someone - anyone - say, hey, pushing Iran into a corner with threats (Shiite Iran, remember, not Sunni Al-Qaeda) is probably not going to work. It’s also nice to hear a voice - a lone voice, but a voice nonetheless - call for Washington to dismount the gravy train and tighten its belt, for a change.

Unfortunately, I could never vote for Ron Paul for the simple reason that some of his other ideas are completely crazy.

Not crazy as in “That man has lost his mind.” He seems like a perfectly sane and logical person to me. Rather crazy the way only a complete ideologue can be.

It slips out a little bit in this interview with Judy Woodruff. He makes some great points, and he really makes you want to rally to his cause with his corn-fed Texan common sense, but then he says stuff like, for example, that deficit spending means the government is just printing more money, and it will therefore cause inflation.

Now, I’m no economist, but first of all this isn’t post-World War I Germany. The vast, vast, vast majority of money in “circulation” doesn’t even get printed anymore, and as far as I know, deficit spending has little to do with inflation, although I’d be happy to cede the point to any actual economist.

Neither do I understand why he’s so hung up on his gold standard schtick, and to be honest with you, I’m not really interested in entrusting our country’s monetary policy to an obstetrician who’s had the same theories since the 1970s.

His fetish for the intentions of the Founding Fathers is also worrisome, because I think he really means it. Never mind that the Founding Fathers thought they were founding a loose amalgamation of agrarian states who hated Britain, held slaves, and elected presidents by committee.

Without combing through the rest of Ron Paul’s quirks the give me the willies, here we can cut back to the chase: Ron Paul would be a bad president because he’s an ideologue. Any ideologue, from the Communists to fundamentalist Muslims to the neo-conservatives, are bad news in my book because rather than adapting their theories to reality, they try to explain away reality with their theories.

This, of course, explains why the “youth” or whatever are flocking to Ron Paul. The youth love ideologues. The youth are stupid. Hopefully they will grow out of it.

Personally, I would rather have a morally flexible president that doesn’t much care about big ideas or core beliefs, but rather seeks the approval of the American people with reasonable policies, a president that’s capable of flexing and twisting to deal with all the contradictory and hypocritical decisions an American president has to make in order to keep us all comfortable in this messy, democratic, common-law country of ours.

That’s why I’m voting for Hillary.