it is ok for the haters of breath to speak like this. all who are not of gargantuan intellect -like hiQ alGore - of the 102 variety, maxine waters - of the 89 variety- are not allowed to speak. go ahead leftists. you (sic) need not rebuttal. you need dirt naps.

The libs are desperate. The people are rallying to the Un-Clinton. The elites feel their sway over public opinion crumbling and they are pulling out the stops to try to continue being the mediators of the "truth". Too late, dirt bags. We have a real leader, and the people know it.

Anyone that would bash the prez at a time like this is paralyzingly stupid; this includes another Katie, on the Today Show.

Liberals are good at one thing: Displaying their acute shortage of gray matter.

Who the hell is Katie Roiphe? She might have just as easily have said of our former president, "He might be a highly literate current coke-head who has spent his entire life using others and then casting them aside. But he is the one in charge and I find myself wanting to service him orally just because he wants me to, he feels my pain don't you know. I know this because he told me so himself, on television. He surely wouldn't lie would he?"

Sorry. I signed up just to post this, but don't have posting rights yet. So I added it to another discussion as a reply. Upon reading it, I was speechless... World Trade Center was unsafe at any height Commentary By David Bowman This sentence is being written at 4:45 a.m., September 12, less than 24 hours after the World Trade Center rains death down from the skies. Among the babble that continues nonstop on National Public Radio is a dispatch about the New Jersey medical triage unit set up to handle some of the victims. The reporter says the first step for intake is to hose down all the patients to decontaminate their bodies covered with asbestos dust. Even before the full dimensions of tjis tragedy are known, and the horrific loss of life is tallied up, once more, like some NFL Super Bowl score, it seems safe to say that the World Trade Center was unsafe at any height. In the mid-1960s, consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote a devastating critique of a new automobile design which he called Unsafe At Any Speed. Something analogous, architecturally speaking, resulted a few years later with the erection of the 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center. Forget for a moment, who may have crashed the two airliners into the World Trade Center towers. Focus only on the architectural hubris (akin to the Tower of Babel) that created the WTC. With an eerie prescience, that makes the hair stir on the back of the neck, architectural critic Paul Goldberger, writing soon after it was completed in 1977, in his The City Observed: A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan (1979). Ends with this chilling epitaph: “By now the twin towers are icons, as familiar in souvenir shops as those little miniatures of the Empire State Building. We have all come to some sort of accommodation with the towers, God help us, and there have even been moments when I have seen them from afar and admitted to some small pleasure in the way the two huge forms, when approached from a distance, play off against each other like minimal sculpture. But the buildings remain an occasion to mourn: they never should have happened, they were never really needed, and if they say anything at all about our city, it is that we retreat into banality when the opportunity comes for greatness.” They never should have happened. It is impossible not to agree with him, or with the corollary, that the World Trade Center tragedy never should have happened, as we may ultimately discover, some months from now, after a thorough forensic analysis of the geopolitical circumstances that impelled the terrorists to their barbarous acts. Listen to Goldberger, who took over from the redoubtable Ada Louise Huxtable as architectural critic for the New York Times, once again: “Two big, tall boxes, with a few dainty, short boxes in a front yard too big and uncomfortable for any of them; absolutely no relationship to anything around the site — to either the river or the surrounding streets … The buildings are pretentious and arrogant; it is hard not to be insulted by Minoru Yamasaki’s belief that a few cute allusions to Gothic tracery at the bottom and top could make a 110-story building humane. “While the load-bearing walls are a remarkable engineering accomplishment — they are, in effect, like a mesh cage supporting the weight of the entire building, making these towers a different breed entirely from steel-frame construction — their structure has led to windows that are mean slivers, unconsciously denying office workers the panoramic views that should be their just compensation for putting up with the place.” Here is described a major chunk of the scenario for the disaster of September 11, 2001: it is the fact that on a typical workday some 40,000 people are trapped in a steel-mesh cage like laboratory animals. A number of these 40,000 will be lucky enough to escape. But, they will surely take with them the understanding never to enter such a structure voluntarily again. It is unfair to tag Yamasaki with having perpetrated this design, any more than the other architect involved, Emery, Roth & Sons, the mega-firm responsible for several other Manhattan atrocities, like the General Motors Building (1968, with Edward Durell Stone, who did the Kennedy Center). No, if there is a culprit, it may be the WTC’s clients, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who, in Goldberger’s words, “seem unable to see quality as anything but bigness.” Several portents of disaster appear around the period when the WTC is under construction (1970-1977). One is Peter Blake’s Form Follows Fiasco (1977), an anecdotal anthology of why buildings fail, in such ways as windows popping out of the Hancock Tower in Boston, promising to guillotine anyone walking along the sidewalks below. Needless to say, perhaps, it is not a popular book, either with the architects addicted to modernism (flat roofs that leak, skywalks that fall down, etc.). The other portent is a disaster-movie, The Towering Inferno (1974), which pretends to pay tribute to the heroics of the firefighters battling the skyscraper fire but (with Hollywood’s usual cynicism) simply exploits our appetites for other people’s suffering (in film critic Leonard Maltin’s words, “devising grisly ways for people to die”). The film’s serious point, however, is that by its very tallness the skyscraper poses a horrendous hazard for anyone within it: firefighters cannot evacuate people out the windows, 10 or more stories up in the air, and of course everything fails — the elevators, the steel skeleton, HVAC, etc. — once tremendous heat, fire and smoke are applied to the high-rise pyre. For that matter, who can say but that the terrorists got their ideas from such a disaster movie, or from Air Force One (1997), a thriller about Kazakhstani terrorists who take over the President’s airplane and hold the First Family hostage? Does anyone argue any more that mass media aren’t truly educational? If we want to start assigning blame for the World Trade Center tragedy, we need to concede that the fault lies not out there, way beyond our borders, but within ourselves, our culture’s blood-lust, that makes us voracious consumers of other people’s suffering, and delivers it in a guilt-free box called television, or on a screen called the cinema, or some muted but still horrifying medium like radio. In this case, the events of September 11, 2001 offer a round-the-clock orgy of voyeurism, as only CNN and its clones can crank out, stopping only for brief commercial messages. There has to be a way, and a means, to turning it all off. http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com David Bowman is a columnist, editor and editorial page editor of the Huntsville News. He has taught courses on writing at the University of Arkansas (about architecture) and Vanderbilt University (composition). Historic Nashville’s “Historic Ink,” August/September 2001, contains his article on the north Nashville Werthan Mills project.

ROFL! excellent "re-phrase"! Sorry it took me 45 days to read it!