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I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. . There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.
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america
humor
truth
fourth-commandment
profane
the-lord
country
sabbath
profanity
new-hampshire
minister
church
secular
superstition
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Henry David Thoreau |
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"Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you
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racism
politics
african-americans
plantation
barack-obama
martin-luther-king-jr
hillary-clinton
iowa
new-hampshire
united-states-elections-2008
george-w-bush
united-states
hypocrisy
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Christopher Hitchens |
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During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president--only the second impeachment hearing in American history--you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.
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money
lies
history
women
politics
presidents
us-presidents
chauvinism
democratic-party-us
impeachment
new-democrats
republican-party-us
us-presidential-election-1992
us-senate
impeachment-of-bill-clinton
pathology
new-hampshire
carol-blue
bill-clinton
elections
united-states
corruption
trials
misogyny
sexism
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Christopher Hitchens |
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"Yet isn't it all--all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga--exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her 'greatness' (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally
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lies
sex
politics
ambition
2008
expediency
hillary-clinton
iowa
iowa-caucuses
new-hampshire
new-hampshire-primary
self-promotion
united-states-elections-2008
bill-clinton
iraq
iraq-war
united-states
greatness
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Christopher Hitchens |
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"The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. ("The Triumph Of The Night")"
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winter
new-england
freezing
ice
new-hampshire
snow
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Edith Wharton |