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The Weekly Screed
The roar of the grease stain, the smell under the hood by David Benjamin “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.” — E. B. White MADISON, Wis. — The presumptuous Republican presidential candidate styles himself as a man of the people, the buddy of the working class. But how…
Read More...The NRA’s worst nightmare by David Benjamin “The Bible says that homosexuals should be put to death… Obviously, it’s not right for somebody to just, you know, shoot up the place… these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels…” — Pastor Steven Anderson, Faithful Word…
Read More...The universal kitchen table by David Benjamin “Out of the kitchen, to stew is to fret, to worry, to agitate. In the kitchen, however, to stew is to have great expectations” — Molly O’Neill PARIS — In another life, with another wife, my in-laws were Ralph and Edie, who lived above a store in Jamaica…
Read More...The Achilles’ kisser of Donald Trump by David Benjamin “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” — Donald Trump PARIS — It’s a mystery — especially given the example he has established — why none of his opponents for the presidency of the United States have attacked…
Read More...“We could dump it… over the rail” by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — My kid brother, Bill, had no particular plans. His style was to go with the flow, roll with the punches. You could get into Bill’s face but you couldn’t get much lip. He’d find an angle of deflection. He’d step aside with…
Read More...A really great — incredible! — foreign policy plan!! by David Benjamin “His first hundred days would be riveting.” — Ari Fleischer TRUMP HEADQUARTERS, NEVERNEVERLAND U.S.A. — Listen! The first thing we do — first thing! — we buy Mexico. The whole country. I mean, that’s how I do things. I make deals! I’m a…
Read More...Getting Peggy back by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — We’re getting my sister back. We began to lose Peg, my previously bossy big sister, when her body was taken over by a merciless mystery called lupus. It invaded her kidneys, eventually devouring them. She got a replacement kidney, named Steve, from a young man who…
Read More...Stop saying that! by David Benjamin “Literally for Figuratively. ‘The stream was literally alive with fish.’ ‘His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet.’ It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.” — Ambrose Bierce, from Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults MADISON,…
Read More...I wanna be Donny’s girl by David Benjamin “Dowd is rooting for the bear… She’ll criticize Trump, but ultimately, she’s OK with him, because he plays his gender role in what she has decreed to be an appropriate manner. He’s a boor, a rogue, a bully and a jerk, but… he’s a man, and that’s…
Read More...Pants police pulling for Carolina by David Benjamin “Lawmakers had focused… on the contention that it might allow men dressed as women to enter bathrooms and commit assaults. There is no evidence that has happened elsewhere, and it is not clear how the North Carolina regulation will be enforced…” — Jonathan Katz, The NY Times…
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