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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (4973)	9/21/2003 2:22:55 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

BUT SERIOUSLY Our Postsatirical World It's hard to come up with anything more absurd than reality. BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004041 Sunday, September 21, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT I write--or try to write--under the general heading of satire, ever mindful of playwright George S. Kaufman's admonition that satire is what opens on Saturday night and closes Sunday. It's a living, I suppose, poking fun at politicians and the French, and every so often Barbra Streisand makes one's day by issuing a 25-page manifesto lecturing Democrats on how to win back a majority in Congress. In my line of work, that's the equivalent of what people in the business world call "low-hanging fruit." Lately, though, there has been so much low-hanging fruit that you can't take a step in any direction without bumping into an overripe mango. The Clinton years were very good to those of satirical ilk. If you Googled "Lewinsky" and "Leno" and "Letterman," your laptop would crash. But just when you thought it was safe to turn on your TV and rest up with a 16-part Ken Burns series on the Tennessee Valley Authority, the departing Bill Clinton pardoned a fugitive financier whose wife was a major donor to his party. In kayaking parlance, this is called a "wet exit." Say what you will, I miss the man.We were still reeling from Election 2000 and the news that--hel-lo?--1,400 sincere but confused Gore voters in Palm Beach had gone walkabout from their gated communities and elected George W. Bush president by casting their ballots for Pat Buchanan. As Yogi Berra said, when informed that a Jewish man had been elected mayor of a town in Ireland, "Only in America." The 37 days of Recount 2000 may have been a constitutional crisis for you, but not for those of us who make our daily bread razzing the grownups. Yet the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh. Sept. 11 was The Great Sobering, and for a while people asked if anything was ever going to be funny again, just as some had after the JFK assassination. ("Of course we'll laugh again," Daniel Patrick Moynihan told Mary McGrory at the time, "we'll just never be young again.") But as the saying goes, time wounds all heals. This summer brought a veritable jungle of low-hanging California lemons, in the form of Recall 2003. What's this? A former Austrian bodybuilder who became a movie star playing a mass-murdering robot and married a Kennedy is running for governor of the world's fifth-largest economy? Moreover, that he is joined in this grail-quest by 134 other Templars, including Arianna Stassinopoulos, star of "My Big Fat Texas Divorce Settlement," plus the editor and founder of Hustler magazine, a porn actress and a vertically challenged former sitcom star who took umbrage when a radio show host asked him to name the vice president of the United States, on the grounds that it was obviously a trick question and anyway had nothing to do with his qualifications to administer a state the size of Iraq.Does this require improving upon? The satirist's job is the same as a cook's: to simmer the raw ingredients over the stove until they're reduced to absurdity. But in a postsatirical world, the ingredients are so fresh, why bother cooking them? And now Mrs. Clinton is saying--unequivocally!--that she has no intention of running for president. I give up. Tennis, anyone? Mr. Buckley is editor of Forbes FYI magazine. His latest book, "Washington Schlepped Here," was published recently by Crown.