Gizmodo 
Jun 3, 2004 11:25 PM
31
Wonkette's weekly service to our readers: Translating Tina Brown's Thursday column in the Washington Post. We understand it so that you don't have to.
| Tina says | Tina means |
| In her Sunday column in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd spoke wistfully of the "moral clarity" of World War II. | I guess it's safe to admit I read her by now. |
| In the Hamptons on Memorial Day weekend, most of the pundit class spent evenings arguing about exit strategies in Iraq and then beating a nostalgic retreat to watch "The Longest Day," "Patton" and "Saving Private Ryan." | That's what it sounded like through the window, anyway. The surf is so damn noisy. |
| Of course, the blinding moral clarity about entering World War II is a lot more blinding in retrospect than it was at the time of entry. | I believe you can be blinded more than once. Also: They still aren't editing me. |
| All it means is that when we turn on the TV and see the smiling photo ops of the new Iraqi government looking as tidy and well-organized as the Swiss, it's hard to buy into it. | The Tivo recorded "The Sound of Music" instead of "Aaron Brown" again. |
| In New York, what's souring the psyches of baby boomers is the sullen sense that they did have a whiff of their own Greatest Generation moment, after 9/11 — and then, too soon, were cheated out of it. | It is, in fact, possible for New Yorkers to become more self-centered. |
| Certainly in the weeks after the attacks, New York was an inspiring place to be. The capital of Making It was suddenly liberated from greed and self-promotion. | I was in vacationing London for the entire month of September. |
| Every moment seemed touched by some new detail of local goodness, like the shaky approach of an elderly lady at the checkpoint downtown with the only thing she could offer a rescue worker, a bag of ice. | I should probably pay my housekeeper more. |
| You didn't have to be inconceivably brave like our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq or go to some barbaric foreign outpost on assignment to see acts of courage and dedication every day. | You could become my housekeeper. |
| While we flip between Time magazine's Obesity issue and Newsweek's cover on Way Cool Phones, someone else's kids from the heartland are back on the blood-soaked sands. | Occassionaly I read my housekeeper's mail. She has a sister in Ohio or something. |
| An indication that all this ambivalence has turned us into basket cases is the pre-publication buzz about "Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President," a book by an academic and shrink named Justin Frank. | I have lost interest in my original thesis. |
For Baby Boomers, Greatest Moments Disappeared in a New York Minute [WP]
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