Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied hisself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.
Gene WeingartenI don't see a point in advertising my marital status when men don't. Completely ridiculous.
Gene WeingartenIf I lived where I live right now, and my kids were in middle school, they would be the only white kids in the school. That is not a burden I wanted to place on them. My preference would have been a school that was totally diverse - half and half, or close. I wouldn't have hesitated at all if they would have been in the racial minority. But to be the only white kids: I don't think that would have been fair to them.
Gene WeingartenI read a lot of conservatives. They are thoughtful and intelligent and annoying, and I always read them because they have viewpoints that challenge my own, even thought they are wrong. But this does me no good because, being intelligent and sophisticated human beings, they are all contemptuous of Trump. They hate him. They find him...vulgar.
Gene WeingartenI think there are a good many Donald Trump voters who are sick of government as it is practiced in America and genuinely want to blow up the system and see what happens. They are stupid - or at least unwise - but not necessarily racist.
Gene WeingartenIt is hard to quantify the value of name recognition, but Donald Trump has gone from fame to international mega-fame. That has to be gargantuan when your business is your name.
Gene WeingartenEditorials are editorials. They a supposed to have an opinion, even a very strong one.
Gene WeingartenDonald Trump is way worse than George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a fundamentally decent man of limited intelligence who surrounded himself with awful people who dragged him in terrible directions. He was a bad president. But he was not actively malign, in the sense that he did what he thought was right. I don't think this guy cares what's right. I think he's in it for self-aggrandizement, for profit, and for power.
Gene WeingartenAsk creative people where they get their ideas, and they will roll their eyes. It's the most common question, but it's also a bad one because the answer is inevitably disappointing. From the inside, creativity seems like an arduous task, often involving plebeian, imperfect choices, driven less by inspiration than by deadline.
Gene WeingartenReporters are not merely recording devices that take down what people say and repeat it in print; we are expected to use our knowledge and experience both for triage - deciding what's important to cover and what isn't - and for contextualizing, analyzing and such.
Gene WeingartenI think Marco Rubio could never have recovered from revealing himself to be pathetic.
Gene WeingartenI believe that sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity is important, and nuanced, even more so when it intersects with the issue of free speech.
Gene WeingartenI believe the publisher is a member of the editorial board, and I think his vote would matter.
Gene WeingartenThe odd thing is that Trump's hand movements don't seem to coordinate with the topic at hand. Most pols manage to make their hand movements correspond with the message, so a slash will accompany emphasis, etc. Trump's got about three moves, the most notable of which is his "okay" gesture, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Anyway, Trump has only a few gestures, including that one, and to my eye he uses them seemingly indiscriminately. I've seen him use the "okay/f.u." sign to be pedantic.
Gene WeingartenThe one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.
Gene WeingartenPeggy Noonan is not as good a columnist as my colleague Kathleen Parker, in my opinion, but they share something related to their Pulitzers. Kathleen won in in 2010. They won it for a similar reason. They broke from their crowd, and sprinted away. They delivered the politically unexpected take, at some peril to their readership.
Gene WeingartenJohnny Hart became much less funny after he found sobriety, and religion, around the same time.
Gene WeingartenOne thing I am learning from the kitten is that everything he is doing seems to be in preparation for murder.
Gene WeingartenOn Twitter, people like me regularly get called "sore losers" by Trumpeters. It just makes me roll my eyes. This is not about winning and losing. We all lost, even them, they just don't know it yet.
Gene WeingartenI always love it when a small paper wins. When I was growing up in the Bronx, the editor of the Riverdale Press - a neighborhood rag - kept submitting his columns for a Pulitzer. We laughed and laughed at his ego. He finally won.
Gene WeingartenDonald Trump would never belong to a church that required a ten percent hit. He's too smart.
Gene WeingartenIs it really the right of the media to dictate to the president whom he will allow in his press conferences? That's tetchier. And then there is the added issue of whether it would be a service to their readers, and the country at large, for, say, the Washington Post to take itself out of the room -- meaning they don't have the ability to ask important questions the president is obliged to answer? I think that would be a mistake.
Gene WeingartenThe verb "Garland" should be created. It would mean to unfairly put a stinking albatross around someone's neck, to make him unemployable.
Gene WeingartenThe advent of DNA testing, and the number of convictions thrown out, has confirmed that we've put LOTS of innocent people to death. There need not be any other argument against death penalty.
Gene WeingartenWe want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.
Gene WeingartenI believe that the fragile-flower, idea-intolerant society of victimhood that is being cultivated in many colleges today is really bad.
Gene WeingartenWhen my daughter was a senior in high school, I remember noticing, almost in passing, that her friends were very cute. Which made me realize her friends' fathers probably found Molly very cute.
Gene WeingartenMaking stuff up is the worst thing a journalist can do. Plagiarizing is the second worst.
Gene WeingartenDonald Trump is showing the intellectual rigor, and emotional maturity, of a second grader. That's hardly being age-ist. This is a man who, when accused by Hillary Clinton of being a Putin puppet, actually responded: "No puppet! No puppet! YOU'RE the puppet."
Gene WeingartenMost men I know adore women, and I am including gay men. I think studies on jury selection show that the biggest critics of women - people less likely to trust their character or judgment - are women.
Gene WeingartenAllowing a non-lawyer to be on the Supreme Court strikes me as a very American thing, in a good way. Another is that the speaker of the house doesn't have to be a member of congress. He or she can be anyone. I'm not sure if James Madison really intended that, or if the wording was accidentally imprecise, but the Constitution, as a recall, simply says that the House shall chuse a speaker.
Gene WeingartenI once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.
Gene Weingarten