Posts - September 2008

Why can’t McCain stop saying “My friends”?

[I]n the last half-century it’s been exclusively resorted to by the worst orators in our presidential races.

What happened to change the phrase’s status in our language after Eisenhower’s 1956 speech? I have my own unprovable pet theory: It’s because the following year saw The Music Man debut on Broadway. Ever since, the phrase has been irrevocably associated with old-timey con men in straw boaters: “My friends, you got trouble right here in River City!“

If it’s not at all obvious (ya think?), I’m enthralled by the Sarah Palin trainwreck.

I agree with Andy that there’s a strong chance she won’t be on the ballot in November. They’ll find a way for her to withdraw for personal or health reasons while saving McCain as much face as possible. Reasons can always be found in politics, just as Charles Krauthammer scripted a withdrawal scenario for Harriet Miers.

Palin isn’t helping him with women, but she’s firing up the base, so if he replaces her with someone who’s not a social conservative, they’ll revolt. So he’ll wind up picking Huckabee (or maybe Jindal if he comes off looking good from Gustav, even though he has even less gubernatorial experience than Palin?).

But I actually don’t want her to leave the ticket — as long as she helps McCain lose. She’s proving to be a horrible distraction and I love it. (I’d make a reference to “Hurricane Palin,” but it’s been done.)

Okay, I’m tired of writing about Sarah Palin. I’m tired of thinking about Sarah Palin. I want her to go away. But she won’t go away.

I don’t know what to make of her speech last night. She sure fired up the base. There’s no chance she’d leave the ticket now — she’s all in. Miers’s Supreme Court nomination tanked only because she lacked base support; the far right didn’t care a whit that she was unqualified to be on the Court. But Palin, they love her. And, of course, they don’t care a whit that she’s unqualified to take over the U.S. presidency.

Anyway, her speech seemed kinda… nasty. Negative. Snide. I don’t see how it wins over swing voters. I understand that sometimes the VP candidate is supposed to be the attack dog, but it didn’t sit right. It seemed like something from Fox News. I thought to myself, You’ve got some nerve, lady, giving a speech like this. Nobody knows anything about you except these tabloidesque revelations that have dribbled out over the last few days, and this is the speech you give?

She’s definitely got chutzpah. But that seems to be it.

And when you combine it with Nosferatu’s Giuliani’s speech, wasn’t last night all very Pat Buchanan 1992? And apparently Rudy’s speech ran long, so they had to cut out Palin’s biographical film in order to stay in prime time. But it went past prime time anyway.

I swear, I fear and loathe this woman. I don’t know what it is.

I just stumbled upon an article in the New York Times archives, from ten years ago, about the disappearance of the New York City accent.

Back in the 1960′s, Professor Labov, then at Columbia University, did one of the first studies to show that classic New Yorkese was linked to lower socioeconomic status. He figured that the correct use of the ”r” sound would be a good indicator of social position. In other words, the higher people’s social class, the more likely they would be to use the ”r” conventionally.

The professor went to three department stores — Saks, Macy’s and the now-defunct S. Klein — each catering to a different socioeconomic group, and asked employees for the location of a department he knew to be on the fourth floor. Sure enough, he soon discovered that that the clerks serving the more affluent shoppers in upscale Saks said ”fawth flaw” far less frequently than their peers at bargain-basement Klein’s, with Macy’s somewhere in the middle. A 1986 study using the same methodology (substituting the now-gone J. W. May’s for Klein’s) confirmed that the trend still existed, and it almost certainly continues today, Professor Labov said.

I gave myself an extended Labor Day holiday — I took Tuesday and Wednesday off from work this week.

I largely wasted Tuesday. I sat around all day until the late afternoon, when, in a panic, I decided I needed to do something fun. (Yes, I am aware of the contradiction.) So I went for a long walk along Riverside Drive, and then I came home and watched Anatomy of a Murder, which I’d TiVo’d. Intriguing movie about a murder trial. Cynical plot, smart acting, great jazz score. And it deals with very raw themes for 1959. Jimmy Stewart actually utters the phrase “sexual climax.” JIMMY STEWART. Sexual climax! In 1959! There’s also discussion of panties, intercourse, and semen. This movie was released before the MPAA ratings system, when the motion picture code was still in effect, and I don’t understand how it got past the code.

One really cool thing about the movie is that the actor who plays the judge was, in real life, the attorney who represented the Army during the Army-McCarthy hearings before Congress, and uttered the famous words, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Yesterday was better. I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I hadn’t been there in a couple of years and I had a wonderful time. It was my first time there since they renovated the Greek and Roman galleries last year. They’re fantastic. I spent almost 90 minutes in those galleries alone, and it was especially interesting because I’ve been learning Latin lately and reading about ancient Rome. I also saw an exhibit of works by 19th century British painter J.M.W. Turner, as well as the Jeff Koons exhibit on the roof garden, where I looked out at the treetops of Central Park. It was a glorious afternoon.

I love looking at ancient objects. History smacks you in the face with its realness. These are actual objects that actual human beings touched — more than 2,000 years ago! I will stare at a Greek urn, scrutinize a piece of ancient Roman jewelry behind glass, and think to myself: ancient Greeks and Romans left the sweat of their fingerprints on this very object. The actual atoms that make up this object have been stuck together — buried underground, perhaps, but still intact — for the entire history of Western civilization; empires have risen and fallen, wars have been bought, scientific revolutions have occurred, and this object has persisted. History is real! You can read about it and it can seem as distant and fictional as J.R.R. Tolkien, but no — it all really happened. There really were people 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. It makes me feel small and insignificant — but at the same time I feel like I’m communing with them, these ancients across the centuries, these human beings who may as well be aliens.

It gives me shivers.

I’m depressed about the election. It’s hard for me to watch election news lately, because it gets me alternately angry and down. Polls that show McCain in the lead? It absolutely flummoxes me.

How can this man be in the lead? How can it be that Sarah Palin, a woman who has done absolutely nothing to show that she can be president of the United States, is winning people over? What the fuck is wrong with people? I just don’t understand why Christian fundamentalists want her to be in the White House just because she’s a Christian fundamentalist too. What does fundamentalist Christianity have to do with secular government? What does it have to do with being the leader of one of the most powerful countries on the planet?

Why don’t people know how to THINK?

It’s not just Americans. There are plenty of complete idiots around the world. Middle Eastern terrorists are idiots. Conspiracy theorists are idiots. European anti-Semites are idiots. There are idiots on all seven continents. Yes, Antarctica included.

And it’s not just today. Human beings throughout history have been idiots. Look at the Crusades, look at ancient wars.

I tend to think of myself as an intelligent person. But when half the country can support a man who has shown no inclination to change any of the current administration’s policies, policies that have driven us over a cliff, it makes me wonder if the problem is actually me. Am I the idiot? Am I the delusional one? Should I stop insisting that there are four lights?

No, seriously. I don’t understand. Are people really this stupid?

Okay, clearly the answer is yes. Four years ago our country took a look at George W. Bush, one of the worst presidents in American history — and re-elected him.

But what I’m more interested in is why. Why are people so stupid? Why can people make these decisions without actually thinking? Why don’t people know? How? To? THINK????

I know there are so many different types of people in this country. I have no idea what it’s like to be a religious fundamentalist, or to be so busy with a job and kids that I get all my news from talk radio, or to have spent all my life in the suburbs and never lived without a car. Our political views are formed by our life experiences.

And I know we all have different brains, and different chemical makeups — different personality types, different talents, different interests. And these affect our political views as well.

In a country of 300 million people, it should be no surprise that people hold different opinions.

But come on! What the fuck is WRONG with these people?

It really makes me want to cry.

And I have zero faith that my opinions on ANYTHING are correct anymore.

Slate polled its readers to find the most common Netflix rentals to go unwatched. Slate‘s solution, by the way, is that if you don’t watch a movie within a week, send it back:

Mailing back a DVD unwatched doesn’t mean you’ll never get another shot at it. And Netflix is the one paying the postage. Why not give yourself a week to see Hotel Rwanda. If you don’t get to it, maybe it’s because you’re a bad person who turns a blind eye to unspeakable tragedy. But maybe it’s just because you’re not quite in the mood for it right now. Perhaps in a few months the disc will again reach the top of your queue and you’ll tear it out of the envelope and throw it into the Toshiba the day it arrives in the mail. In the meantime, you can get started on a good Paleolithic kick.

This weekend I finally watched The Insider after 2 ½ months.

Someone hates drawing attention to himself, even (well, especially) when it’s someone’s birthday. But I don’t care.

So, happy birthday, Matt!

I haven’t donated any money to Barack Obama.

I almost did it during the primaries — several times. I was excited by him and I wanted him to win. But I didn’t donate.

Then I got disillusioned with him in the spring, and I was glad I hadn’t donated.

Now once again I’m wondering if I should donate. But I’m resistant.

The reason I haven’t donated is because I’m very careful with my money. I think for a long time before spending anything. And I decided that while my 25 or 50 bucks might be useful to the Obama campaign, they’d be much more useful to me. The Obama campaign has a few million dollars. I don’t.

The thing is, if everyone felt that way, nobody would donate. I know this is one of those philosophy problems that has a name, but I can’t remember what it is. Game theory?

I guess if I want to help a political campaign, the best thing to do would be to volunteer. My local Democratic organization is doing some field trips to New Jersey and Pennsylvania this fall. New York isn’t a swing state, and New Jersey isn’t really either, but Pennsylvania is. Maybe I could do some good if I volunteered in Pennsylvania.

It’s easier to just go to the Obama website and click on “Donate.” But then my dollars are getting amassed with millions of other dollars, and I don’t know what my particular dollars are doing. If I volunteer — helping to register voters, or make phone calls, for instance — then I can actually see the results.

So maybe I’ll volunteer.

Tonight we’re going to see Daniel Radcliffe naked.

We’re going to be in the last row of the mezzanine, but I’d be too embarrassed to bring binoculars.

(Oh, and he’s not naked in that link. It’s safe to click.)

I liked this from Electoral-vote.com:

Nobody really expects politicians to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but the willingness of the candidates to brazenly tell out-and-out lies has reached a new high this year. In the past, politicians would shade the truth a bit and if they were caught, would stop. No more. The Washington Post has a story on that today. One example: “McCain says rival Barack Obama would raise everyone’s taxes, even though the Democrat’s tax plan exempts families that earn less than $250,000.” But a poll taken Sept. 5-7 shows that 51% of the voters thought Obama would raise their taxes. Republican strategist John Feegery said: “these little facts don’t really matter.” What he means is that the campaign is trying to exploit the long-standing Republican theme that Democrats raise taxes and Obama’s promise to raise taxes only on the rich is an unimportant detail that can be safely ignored. In the past the press called candidates to order when they lied. Now the model is to give each side equal time, even if one is brazenly lying. For example, if Obama wanted to motivate younger voters, he could say: “McCain will bring back the draft and everyone under 21 will be sent to Iraq.” There is not a shred of evidence for this, of course, but the press would dutifully report it along with McCain’s outraged denial. But the seed would be planted. Three days later there would be a poll showing that 35% of the voters think McCain will bring back the draft. That’s how the game is played these days. It ain’t beanbag.

What Obama should actually do is start saying to seniors, “McCain will take away your Social Security.” Then let the press fight it out with McCain.

Matt and I are trying to plan a short vacation to New England this fall. The idea of going out into the country in the fall just fills me with wonderful shivers. We’d like to take off a Monday/Tuesday or a Thursday/Friday and make a long weekend of it. But where to go, exactly?

One idea is Boston. Matt’s never been. But I’ve been there several times. Even though the most recent visit was eight years ago, I wonder if I’d be bored. Maybe, maybe not.

The other idea is to do something rural — a country inn or something. I have this fantasy of staying in a B&B that has a library with comfy chairs, where I could pick random books off the shelves and curl up with one of them in front of a fireplace, and we eat dinner in nice cozy restaurants.

The thing is, I haven’t driven a car in four years and I’d be a little nervous about it. I used to drive all the time. I used to love to take road trips. When I was in school, I’d drive between Virginia and New Jersey a few times a year. In the early part of this decade I drove to and from work. Does driving a car come back to you pretty quickly? It seems like it would.

If we were to do Boston, we could just take Amtrak. But for the New England countryside idea, I’d probably visit my parents in NJ a couple of times in the next few weeks and take the car out for a spin, just to get my road legs back, and then we could rent a Zipcar and drive up to Massachusetts or Vermont or wherever.

Any ideas for where to go or what to do?

The day slips itself into our calendar again. In the limbo of early September — no longer summer, not yet autumn — it shows up. Sometimes I think it’s going to be an ordinary day, and then I read something about it in the damn New York Times and it comes back: the way the day felt, smelled, sounded, tasted.

But most years, my need to react against others’ feelings warps my own. If I try to ignore the media force field, I realize I’m aggressively doing so, which is the opposite of ignoring. If I write about it on the blog, I’m following the Approved Party Line, because We All Must Remember, and I hate doing that. But if I don’t write about it, then that, too, is giving in.

I resent people who weren’t here that day, people who merely watched it on TV in the middle of America and have tried to take ownership of it away from me for the last seven years.

And then I realize I’m being a 9/11 snob.

I shouldn’t discount the feelings of a Kansas grandma who watched it on TV. She has as much right to her feelings as I do.

And there are people who experienced it much more firsthand than I: those who lost a close relative, those who had to escape from the buildings, those who were in the financial district. Compared to them, I’m the Kansas grandma.

We are all allowed to feel what we feel.

So I try to resent the 9/11 sentimentalism only when it comes from people who love America but hate New Yorkers. Or when it’s exploitative. Things like this, or, you know, this.

Doug would probably be married today and he’d probably have a couple of kids. But those kids will never exist. I wonder if unconceived children have souls.

Here’s a handy schedule of fall 2008 TV premieres.

I have no idea who Ari Melber is, but he totally ripped apart a McCain lackey yesterday. Not only that — he’s also hot.

(Which is really all that matters.)

Holy fucking shit. David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night. He was 46 years old.

I can’t believe this.

I adored his writing. Infinite Jest is one of the most amazing novels I’ve ever read.

More links about his death here. Here’s his Wikipedia page.

Metafilter thread.

I’ve written about him several times.

I read Infinite Jest the summer I was 23. It was 1997, I was living at my parents’ house while doing a summer internship, and I had no friends in the area. Instead of a social life I had that book.

I would tote two things together around the house: my paperback copy of Infinite Jest and my hardcover, jacketless copy of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. I wasn’t reading a novel; I was tackling a summer project. I couldn’t read the book anywhere but at home, because I didn’t dare take it someplace without the dictionary by my side.

I wrote a lot in my journal that summer. David Foster Wallace unleashed me. He was the first writer I read whose voice worked his way into my prose. Infinite Jest has been criticized for its logorrhea, but that’s what cut me loose. I embraced the verbosity, the meandering, breathless sentences that Wallace had imbued with just enough centripetal force not to break apart.

I was drawn to Wallace because he seemed like an overthinker, like me. His thoughts flew too fast to remain neatly organized, and they overflowed in his prose. His mind often seemed to be thinking about itself, picking itself apart, getting in the way of itself, just like mine did. If he was allowed to write like that, then so was I.

I fancied that my writing was as good as Wallace’s, but of course it wasn’t. He was far funnier and far more heartbreaking and culturally incisive. Just because you write long recursive sentences and use lots of footnotes, doesn’t mean you can write like Wallace.

Sometimes I thought about writing him a letter. But I knew that I would be doing so only in part to praise him; I really wanted to show him that I was as talented as he was. If I wrote to him about my own discursive and recursive thoughts, he would see that I was just like him! He would notice me and we would totally bond!

And then I decided that no, he would see right through me, that hundreds or perhaps thousands of other people had probably already written him letters in faux-Wallacian style, letters filled with rambling sentences and quirky use of conjunctions and footnotes inside footnotes, attempting to attract Wallace with his own pheromone, just like I wanted to do. I also felt like Wallace existed on a higher plane. Almost literally. That if I wrote him a letter from within the twisted labyrinth of my thoughts, he would be there overhead, piloting some biplane or hot air balloon, and he could actually see the labyrinth from above, and describe my own thoughts far better than I could, and he would see that instead of hedges the labyrinth was all just made out of plywood. That I could see two dimensions but he could see three. Or four or five. That as witty as I might feel, he would always outwit me. That I could try to engage him on his own level, but I’d never be able to.

Someone in this Metafilter thread joked that Wallace must have left a hell of a suicide note. I wonder if his entire body of work was that note. But that sounds trite.

I want to say to him, fuck you for hanging yourself and depriving us of everything else you had left to write. And then I want to apologize to him for that.

I always hoped that someday he’d write another enormous novel, something just as groundbreaking. I hope that there’s something he’d been working on and that someday we’ll be able to see it.

This morning I logged into Sitemeter, my referral stats tracking program. It turns out they revamped the site over the weekend.

And now it completely sucks.

(1) The data is now rendered with Flash, so everything loads much more slowly.

(2) What used to be free you now have to pay for. I used Sitemeter because it easily, elegantly showed me where my last couple hundred blog hits had come from — what link they came from, their IP address, how long they stayed on the site. Now I can’t see any of that.

(3) Actually, I can’t see anything at all now. After you log into the new site for the first time, you have to start logging in using your email address and your password. But my password isn’t working, and although I’m supposed to get a reminder email telling me what it is, I haven’t gotten it.

They took something that worked perfectly well and they ruined it.

Everyone else thinks so too.

Can anyone recommend a good referral-tracking website for blogs?

Update: well, that was fast. I guess they got an earful from their customers.

The New York Times has published its full obituary of David Foster Wallace. They published an interim one yesterday by a different reporter.

David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46. …

I read this book last year:

This book just came out:

Imitation, flattery, etc., but come on.

I’ve been reading many of the David Foster Wallace tributes these last few days. I can’t get enough. The Internet is the biggest enabler of all time.

In addition to being an amazing writer, Wallace was apparently an incredibly dedicated teacher and a really sweet guy.

Here are some tributes that have particularly moved me.

A Life Divided:

He was my teacher, at Amherst, in the fall of 1987. …

DFW was about 25. He had long hair and always came to class with a tennis racket and sometimes cookies. He had us take breaks so he could smoke. We loved him. …

I used to confuse “further” and “farther,” and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I’d confused them yet again, and in the margins, he’d written, simply, “I hate you.” I’ve never confused them since.

Random NY Times commenter:

I taught DFW at Amherst and count him the best student I’ve ever had. …

He wrote two senior theses at Amherst. A creative thesis in English that was his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.

That much is probably common knowledge. Here’s what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.

CC2K:

DFW always seemed several cognitive steps ahead of everyone else working out there—and several steps ahead of me. Much of his stuff just made you shake your head in wonder that anybody’s mental metabolism was speeding fast enough to capture all that he did. …

The really deep and important and amazing thing… DFW did was he helped me come to grips with the noise in my own head, the never-ending eruptions and eruptions out of eruptions of self-consciousness.

Fragments from Palin! The Musical.

We need to make the country work
For ordinary folk.
Direct reform must be the norm,
And … Oops, my water broke.

From the Corrections section of today’s NY Times:

A film review on Sept. 5 about “Save Me” confused some characters and actors. It is Mark, not Chad, who is sent to the Genesis House retreat for converting gay men to heterosexuality. (Mark is played by Chad Allen; there is no character named Chad). The hunky fellow resident is Scott (played by Robert Gant), not Ted (Stephen Lang). And it is Mark and Scott — not “Chad and Ted” — who partake of cigarettes and “furtive man-on-man action.”

Good article on Alaska politics.

I’ve been meaning to say for several weeks that I love the name “Trooper Wooten.” Whenever I hear it, I think it sounds like a character from “Northern Exposure” or “Men in Trees” or “Twin Peaks.”

Trooper Wooten. Trooper Wooten. Trooper Wooten. It’s so much fun to say.

As an avowed New York Times front-page geek, I am very excited about this.

DVDs are not as convenient as external hard drives or online access, but this is still really cool.

Still alive… I’ve got a bad cold, though. I’m back at work today after two days of staying home. I watched a couple of movies, I watched the episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 where the gang meets Color Me Badd.

It seemed as dated as when Marcia Brady met Davy Jones.

Has it really been 16 years since 1992? Where has the time gone?

Sarah Palin: “As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska.”

In response, there’s this.

And that’s why I love the Internet.

Who won the debate?

It’s a silly question and I hate it. It doesn’t make sense, because these things we have every four years are not formal debates. Now, I was never on the debate team or in a debating society, but from what I know, a formal debate covers a single topic. For example, “Resolved: Fredonia should enter into an alliance with the League of Planets.” Or, “Resolved: truth is more important than beauty.” One side argues for, the other side argues against. Afterwards, a panel of judges decides which side had the better argument, and that side is the winner.

These presidential debates aren’t like that. There’s no single topic — there are a bunch of different topics.

On the other hand, there really is a single topic, a meta-topic. “Resolved: Candidate X would be a better president of the United States than Candidate Y.”

But again, the question is academic. Kerry “won” his debates against Bush (“You forgot Poland!,” “Need some wood?”), but he lost the election. Debates can help, but they’re not decisive.

So the question is fluid and subjective, and “who won the debate?” doesn’t automatically determine who gets elected.

Also, the actual debate is only half of what happens. The other half is how the debate gets spun. Perceptions will gel after a day or two. I thought Gore wiped the floor with Bush after their first debate in 2000, but then this little meme spread around that Gore kept “sighing” and that he therefore lost. What utter bullshit. (God… to look back on 2000 and see that so much turned on so little.)

There’s some chatter now on Talking Points Memo and Andrew Sullivan that McCain never made eye contact with Obama tonight and that it strikes some people as odd. Part of me says, so the hell what? Eye contact doesn’t matter. But the other part of me thinks it would be nice payback for 2000.

Tomorrow night will be equally as important as tonight. Tomorrow night is when “Saturday Night Live” will do its debate parody. “Makin’ progress!” “It’s hard work!” “Lockbox.” “Strategery.” Those are what I remember most from SNL’s debate parodies in the last couple of elections. Darrell Hammond or Fred Armisen — whose Obama portrayal still makes me cringe in its utter inaccuracy — will speak some lines that will be watched and replayed all over TV and the web, and that’s what will take hold.

Who won the debate? (1) It’s the wrong question, and (2) we’ll know the answer on November 4.

The candidates celebrate Rosh Hashannah.

On Thursday night we’ll get to see Joe Biden and Sarah Palin debate each other.

This reminds me that one of my favorite national debates ever was the VP debate in 1992.

It was a clash between two iconic politicians: the up-and-coming Al Gore and the embarrassing incumbent VP, Dan Quayle. How could you not watch? Quayle was scrappy and aggressive, tearing into Bill Clinton at every opportunity, while Gore was relentlessly on message, barely concealing his contempt for his former congressional colleague. In the middle was James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s bizarre running mate, interrupting the brawl with odd moments of unintentional humor.

As Maureen Dowd wrote, “With an evidently overcaffeinated Mr. Quayle bouncing from rant to rant to his right and with Mr. Gore relentlessly reeling off speech-chunks to his left, Mr. Stockdale appeared in something of the role of a bewildered grandfather who has wandered down to the rec room in search of his slippers to find himself in the middle of an impassioned teen-age debate on the merits of Ice-T.”

Elizabeth Kolbert: “[F]or those who like to watch politics in its purest form — as a kind of psychological gang warfare — the Vice Presidential debate was one of the best shows the campaign has offered so far.”

Here are the opening statements of all three candidates:

Here’s one of my favorite moments, because it illustrates the tenor of the whole evening:

Here’s the moment where Stockdale says his hearing aid wasn’t turned on:

And here’s another short clip: “pull a Bill Clinton”: