Judi Giuliani’s run for First Slut

The Article: The Thunderbolt: Judi Guiliani’s Run for First Lady by Lloyd Grove. If you’re interested in becoming a power-hungry, manipulative gold digger, learn from the best!

The Text: If everything works out, it may be the last great political deal brokered in a smoke-filled room. On a balmy June night in 1999, Judith Nathan was having a drink at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on East 63rd Street. Her companion was Dr. Burt Meyers, an infectious-disease specialist at Mount Sinai hospital and one of the many physicians she had befriended as a hospital sales rep for Bristol-Myers Squibb. Nathan, then 44, was at ease amid the upmarket manliness, a woman of the world among many middle-aged men of the world, including, that night, the mayor of the City of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.

Club Mac, with its wooden Indians, leather sofas, and “state-of-the-art ventilation system,” had become a well-known late-night haunt for the mayor. Perhaps it was also something of an escape: He was still living at Gracie Mansion with his second wife, television personality Donna Hanover. Here, he could kick back with a tumbler of Glenlivet and relax with City Hall aides and political associates. Sometimes a woman would approach him, interrupting his cigar-smoking to express her admiration, maybe get an autograph. Perhaps flirt mildly. So it wasn’t surprising when Nathan, a pretty woman with rich brown hair, came over and said hello.

This story of how they met had to be pieced together from accounts by Giuliani intimates because the couple refuses to talk about it. Even during their gauzy TV interview this past March with Barbara Walters—who was a guest at their wedding in 2003—which was a custom-made moment to safely peddle this type of personal anecdotage, Judith demurred. “That’s one thing I would kind of like to keep private,” she said, allowing only that “it was by accident.”

A few days after their fateful meeting, the mayor had an aide retrieve Judith’s business card from his desk drawer at City Hall, then he phoned and asked her out. They took in a movie at Loews Kips Bay, The General’s Daughter, which is about a cover-up at West Point. At dinner afterward, at Peter Luger Steakhouse, they were chaperoned by a couple of City Hall staffers.

Later, on the occasion of their marriage, Giuliani would tell the Times’ “Vows” columnist that “our attraction was instantaneous. There was something mystical about the feeling.” He evoked an appropriately operatic moment from one of his favorite novels, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, when Michael Corleone spotted his Sicilian bride, Apollonia. “It was,” Rudy said, “the thunderbolt.”

When she met the mayor at Club Macanudo, Judith Nathan couldn’t have imagined the complexity of the relationship she was getting into. At that point, the considerable successes of Rudy’s mayoralty were in the past and his future was uncertain. He may have looked like a catch, but he certainly did not look like a potential president. There was talk of a Senate run. Now, in a Cinderella-like reversal, Judith Giuliani, with her husband’s help, is auditioning for a vast and contradictory role: romantic partner of America’s Mayor, wholesome third wife, definer of gender roles, and emblem of respectable femininity for an entire nation. So far, her attempts to play this impossible part have been riveting, if sometimes comic.

Rudy Giuliani has always been the most insular of politicians, operating within his personal tribe, at odds with most everyone outside. The prime value is extreme loyalty, and for those in possession of that quality (think Bernard Kerik), much else is forgiven. Like George W. Bush, he and his team create their own reality and wait for the world to follow.

Judith Giuliani is the latest to join this coterie, and by far the most important. He’s given her influence into all facets of his professional life. He has often referred to Judith as his “closest adviser.” In a 2003 TV interview, Rudy claimed that Judith is “an expert we rely on” at Giuliani Partners. “She gives us a lot of advice and a lot of help in areas where she’s got a lot of expertise—biological and chemical,” Rudy said as Judith watched him and nodded vigorously. “And since we do security work, that’s an area of great concern—you know, another anthrax attack, a smallpox attack, chemical agents. She knows all of that.” Famously, he told Barbara Walters that Judith would be able to sit in on cabinet meetings, acting at the time as if this were a perfectly ordinary responsibility for a president to give his wife.

At other times, their presentation has been lovey-dovey to the point of queasiness. Their displays of affection got so gooey during the taping of the Walters interview that the ABC News doyenne is said to have joked, “Enough already!” They held hands and cooed; he called her “baby” and she called him “sweetheart” as they kissed on the lips. At one point, after he absolved her of responsibility for his divorce from Hanover and his alienation from their two children (“She’s done everything she can. She loves all the children”), Judith, who was serenely feminine in a sea-green sweater, with another, lavender sweater tied casually around her neck over it, French preppy style, reached out to caress his cheek. When Walters asked her if she was “bothered” by her affair with the married mayor, Judith responded, blandly, “It was a rocky road, absolutely. But when you have a partnership that is based on mutual respect and communication, the two of you know what’s going on.”

Americans have an unresolved relationship with their idea of what a First Lady should be. It doesn’t usually involve thunder and lightning. Political consultants know what’s easiest to sell: Harriet Nelson, which is to say more or less Laura Bush. More-assertive types, be it the Svengali socialite in couture (early Nancy Reagan), the defiantly unkittenish liberal crusader (early Hillary Clinton), or the aloof and foreign-seeming heiress (Teresa Heinz-Kerry), are more off-putting because it’s difficult to identify with them.

Judith Giuliani’s biggest drawback—her three marriages—reminds voters of Rudy’s own three and the associated tawdry drama. The first, to his second cousin, was annulled after fourteen years. His second, to Hanover, ended with Rudy’s televised May 2000 announcement that he intended to separate from her; Hanover’s shocked, tearful, also-televised response blamed Rudy’s “relationship with one staff member,” i.e., his communications director Cristyne Lategano. That was before much was known about Judith. By the summer of 2001, Judith’s face, along with Donna’s and Rudy’s, was plastered on the cover of People magazine with the tawdry headline INSIDE NEW YORK’S NASTIEST SPLIT … THE MAYOR, THE WIFE, THE MISTRESS.

Six years later, the rollout of Judith-as-wife, as potential First Lady, is still tainted by the smoke of that thunderous extramarital night at Club Mac.

Her magazine appearances have tended to be like the one in the March Harper’s Bazaar, where she talked about “making him happy, making a happy home” and posed lip-to-lip on Rudy’s lap. “I’ve always liked strong, macho men,” she told the magazine. “Rudy’s a very, very romantic guy; we love watching Sleepless in Seattle. Can you imagine my big testosterone-factor husband doing that?” But amid their efforts at cozy public normalcy, suddenly Rudy’s son, Andrew, told a Times reporter that “there’s obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife.”

Theirs is a very New York love story, complicated and, frankly, mature. It’s hard to say how it’ll play in the red states.

In early 2000, as Rudy’s Senate race was getting under way, Judith Nathan was a mysterious but constant presence in the campaign entourage. Rudy didn’t bother to clarify her role internally, and the few people in the know kept their own counsel. One campaign staffer at first assumed Judith was “some sort of adviser or consultant.” Others believed she was a member of his security detail. Finally, by the time Rudy withdrew from the race in May, most folks had figured it out.

The couple was quickly beset by crises: his prostate cancer and then 9/11.

Under Judith’s guidance, he considered various treatment options and decided against surgically removing the prostate—the method that produces the most reliable outcome—in favor of implanting radioactive seeds. Called brachytherapy, it’s a less common procedure that has its advantages: The risk of long-term erectile dysfunction is lower. “He didn’t want the knife down there at all,” says an intimate who was privy to Rudy’s worries.

Meanwhile, Rudy’s divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, acting on his image-battered client’s instructions, announced that Rudy’s radiation treatments had for the past year left him impotent, making sex with his girlfriend impossible.

“Part of the reason Rudy loves her so much is that she loved him, and batted her eyes at him, even when his very virility was questioned, when his sexual vitality was knocked out,” says the former Giuliani associate.

And Giuliani was unquestionably in love.

A few years ago, at a wedding attended by prominent lawyers and judges, Rudy and Judith were sitting at a table where the other guests were having a spirited legal and political discussion. “Rudy was deferring to her the entire evening,” says a fellow guest. “They were talking about the war in Iraq, and she was opining. They were talking about the Second Circuit, and she had an opinion about that too. People didn’t know what to say. And Rudy, if anything, was drawing her out. ‘What do you think about that, baby?’ She likes to talk.”

A former associate of Giuliani’s from the days when he was a mob-busting federal prosecutor says, “Loyalty does mean everything to him. He absolutely adores her. He doesn’t need the expensive Brioni suits she has him wear, or the fancy food she has him eat. He was a cheeseburger-and-martini guy. But Rudy defers to her.”

Almost immediately after they came out as a couple, Judith accompanied the mayor everywhere, even marching alongside him in city parades. Paparazzi staked out her apartment building and her condo in Noyack. Donna Hanover obtained a court order barring Judith from Gracie Mansion.

She quit Bristol-Myers Squibb in March 2001 and, with the connections supplied by her powerful consort, joined a philanthropic consulting firm, Changing Our World Inc., as a managing director.

Before they were married, he indulged her desire to dine regularly at Le Cirque even though the heavy cuisine tended to make him queasy. “It was almost required daily, going to Le Cirque for dinner, and Rudy used to throw up afterward, because the food was so rich,” says a witness. “But she wanted to go, because it was the place to be seen, and the treatment by Sirio [Maccioni, the owner] was incredible.”

As you descend from the hilltops on Route 309 into the former Judi Ann Stish’s hometown, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, it sparkles like shards of glass in the sunlight. Then—closer in, on the edge of town—the vision loses its luster amid the detritus of a long-abandoned coal-mining economy. You pass a barnlike structure sporting a sign that misspells adult shope, then gigantic Quonset huts, then strip malls, then churches. Since the mines shut down after World War II, Hazleton has struggled mightily. In 2002, U.S. News & World Report labeled Hazleton “a town in need of a tomorrow.” Aside from Judi, the city’s most famous native is Jack Palance.

Judi’s second cousin, retired Hazleton Area schools superintendent Geraldine Stish Shepperson, says the family patriarch—whose surname was Americanized from Sticia—emigrated from Italy to toil in the mines with Irish and Slovak settlers in the early 1900s. “They were all poor working people.” Judi’s grandfather Frank Stish, a milkman, was paralyzed in an on-the-job accident, Shepperson says, and Judith’s 81-year-old father, Donald, is a retired circulation manager for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Judi’s mother, Joan, is Polish-American, and these Stishes—including Judi’s older brother, Donnie, and younger sister, Cyndy—attended St. Stanislaus Catholic Church, down the street from their modest two-family house on Carson Street in the Nannygoat Hill neighborhood. These days, Donald and Joan Stish spend part of the year in a Palm Beach condo purchased by Rudy and Judith.

“She was beautiful and had long, reddish hair,” remembers current Hazleton High School English teacher Mike Saleeba, who was a year behind Judi back in the early seventies. “I remember her face—she had a fantastic complexion. I wouldn’t have dared to ask her out.” Still, “she would go out of her way to say hello to you. She wasn’t one of the snobs.”

Saleeba compares Hazleton’s atmosphere in those days to the sitcom Happy Days. Saturday nights were spent dancing to live bands at the local YMCA. Afterward, the kids headed for the Knotty Pine—“the Pines,” they called it—a popular diner where they pulled up in their cars, flashed their headlights, and the waitresses served barbecue sandwiches curbside. Judi’s Hazleton High classmate Mike DeCosmo often dropped her home after a night of fun. “She was one of those people who never had a bad word about anybody, always upbeat, always friendly,” says DeCosmo, today an accountant.

Judi was known as a diligent student and an attractive girl who busied herself with extracurricular activities such as the Future Nurses Association, the tennis and ski clubs, the literary society, and the Diggers Club, a volunteer service organization that “brightened the days of many handicapped and retarded children in Hazleton’s schools,” according to Janus, the high-school yearbook.

In a blue-collar place like Hazleton, nursing was one of the few professions that were seen as appropriate for young women. “There was teaching, and there was nursing. That’s all that was offered to us, really,” says the school librarian, Theresa Krajcirik.

It also got Judith out. She met medical-supplies salesman Jeffrey Scott Ross and, after two years of nursing school up the road in Bethlehem, married him at the Chapel of the Bells in Las Vegas. Then they moved to North Carolina.

Their marriage lasted less than five years. By the time of their uncontested Florida divorce on November 14, 1979, husband No. 2 was already in the wings. She married Bruce Nathan five days later.

They had met in Charlotte, where Bruce had moved after selling the Long Island–based office-furniture business founded by his grandfather. For the 24-year-old Judi, who had spent much of the previous five years on the road, demonstrating and selling surgical equipment, Nathan was a catch. Over the course of their increasingly rocky marriage, they lived in Atlanta and Manhattan (while acquiring a Hamptons summer place) and the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. She left him and moved to New York in March 1992 with their 7-year-old daughter, Whitney.

Not surprisingly, Bruce Nathan’s friends remember Judi less than fondly. “She was a real opportunist, a real Becky Sharp character,” says a Nathan-family friend who shared Thanksgiving dinners with Bruce and Judi. “She was kind of cute, and Bruce was quite handsome—a rich trust-fund kid from Long Island. She was less sophisticated in those days. I think she really desired to be sort of the Junior League type. She basically struck me as having an inflated, self-important view of herself.”

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The voluminous divorce papers filed with Los Angeles County Superior Court paint a more complicated picture. In public court documents, Bruce said he and Judi adopted Whitney in March 1985, when they lived in Atlanta, after trying for five years to have a child on their own. In 1987, they moved to New York, renting a series of apartments on the Upper East Side. The formerly Catholic Judi became an active member of the socially prominent Brick Presbyterian Church. The Nathans enrolled Whitney at the elite Madison Avenue Presbyterian Day School and, later on, Spence. In other court documents, there is mention of a Porsche, a Cadillac, antique furniture, paintings, pricey rugs, a place in Southampton, and, according to Judi, Bruce’s “trust fund valued at $800,000 to one million dollars.” She added, “My husband has had a long history of credit loans to support his lavish lifestyle.”

As with all bad marriages, there seems to have been enough blame to go around. In one of the many affidavits filed and cross-filed by the warring Nathans, Judi accused Bruce of “a violent temper,” “numerous physical assaults and manhandling of me,” including “screaming vile epithets, cursing,” and “punching me in the side of my head” in March 1992. After that alleged attack—which Bruce has denied—Judith retreated with her daughter to a neighbor’s and called the cops. “I feared for my safety and that of my daughter,” she claimed in her affidavit, adding, “I immediately fled California.” She went first to Hazleton and stayed temporarily with her parents, then moved in with friends in Manhattan and took a part-time job in a dentist’s office before eventually finding full-time work at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Bruce, in his own court filings, claimed that Judi had kidnapped their child and branded her an “unfit mother” and a “social climber” whose “‘main goal’ in life was being involved with whatever was ‘the in thing’ at the moment. Whether it was belonging to ‘the right church’ by converting from Catholicism to Presbyterian; playing bridge with the ‘right people’ … enrolling Whitney at the ‘right schools’ in order to further my wife’s social aspirations; wearing designer clothes and jewelry; and vacationing at the fashionable Hamptons.”

And while “I maintained my Jewish heritage,” Bruce alleged that “my wife thought nothing of physically and mentally abusing me within Whitney’s earshot.” When he couldn’t afford something, she referred to him as “Jew boy” and other slurs. Mike McKeon, Judith’s campaign press secretary, dismisses the “ridiculous” fifteen-year-old allegation. “Anti-Semites don’t marry Jews.”

Meanwhile, she went on with her life, having various romances. One is said to have been with a French diplomatic staffer. For four years, she and Whitney and clinical psychologist Manos Zacharioudakis lived together in a one-bedroom apartment on East 55th Street.

Years later, after Rudy made Judith the third Mrs. Giuliani and launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Zacharioudakis rhapsodized to the Daily News about his former lover’s “passion,” “sensual” nature, and “Italian eroticism.”

Around the same time, Judith went back to court over custody arrangements for 16-year-old Whitney. She’d fled her mother’s Upper East Side apartment to move in with her father, safely out of the limelight.

Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed. For one thing, Rudy’s political career was resuscitated. During his illness, Giuliani had become increasingly dependent on her, a relationship that continued into his professional life. “She had to approve his schedule, which had already been finalized weeks before,” says an insider. “People eventually knew not to lock anything in until she’d looked at it.”

In his best-selling 2002 autobiography, Leadership, Giuliani wrote that his future wife had been an effective mayoral adviser after 9/11 because she “had been a nurse for many years, and afterward a pharmaceutical executive; she had managed a team of people and had many organizational skills. Further, she had wide-ranging scientific knowledge and research expertise.” He added that he “put her to work helping me organize the hospitals” to treat the injured from ground zero. His campaign Website, meanwhile, notes, “In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mrs. Giuliani coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.”

But concerning Judith’s participation in the city’s response to 9/11, public-health and security consultant Jerry Hauer takes exception to the Giuliani campaign’s assertions. Hauer—a nationally known bioterrorism expert who was Rudy’s first director of the newly created Office of Emergency Management—minced no words about the claim that the mayor’s then-girlfriend “coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.”

“That is simply a lie,” Hauer tells me. “But Rudy’s not shy about rewriting history when it suits him.”

Hauer had a bitter falling-out with Giuliani after Hauer endorsed Democrat Mark Green’s mayoral candidacy in 2001. “You’re done,” Rudy told him ominously after he and former police commissioner Bill Bratton staged a press conference endorsing Green.

Rex USA)

“I had left city government before 9/11, and Rudy called me back to help out,” Hauer says. “He asked me to relocate the Family Assistance Center from the Armory on Lexington Avenue, which was too small, to Pier 94. We put it together in two and a half days. At that point, he had already announced his separation from Donna and he wanted to get Judith involved somehow. Most people didn’t really care. We had a job to do. Where she had opinions, she offered them, and where they were valuable, we listened. The fact that she was the mayor’s girlfriend didn’t carry a lot of weight with most of the folks working there.”

Afterward, Rudy installed her on the board of the Twin Towers Fund.

The Giuliani-Nathan nuptials were a star-studded extravaganza at which the bride wore a bejeweled Vera Wang gown and a diamond tiara, Mayor Michael Bloomberg officiated, and the 400 guests included Wang, Walters, Beverly Sills, Yogi Berra, Joe Torre, Donald Trump and Melania Knauss, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, Mort Zuckerman and Henry Kissinger, even Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas.

Judith elevated her profile in the charity world by touting various good causes in her column in Gotham magazine. She lent her name to the all-girls Mother Cabrini High School and the McCarton School for autistic children.

In 2003, Judith posed in a cranberry bejeweled Carolina Herrera gown for the cover of the society glossy Avenue. She sported a huge Chopard brooch and Jimmy Choo shoes while reclining languidly in her so-called Moroccan sitting room. From the magazine’s excitable perspective, the Giulianis had “created their own Chartwell,” the name of Sir Winston Churchill’s country house, on the Upper East Side. The article confidently predicted that Judith “could be the most stylish First Lady since another Upper East Sider, Jacqueline Kennedy.”

“You have a successful marriage when you have each other as a priority,” she told the magazine. “I travel with Rudy. He respects me and involved me in all aspects of his life. We get involved in speechwriting. We make decisions together about which places we are going to go. It’s a busy life and we live it together.”

They have adjoining offices at Giuliani Partners at 5 Times Square, where she has installed Pilates machines, the better to keep her husband fit. Today, she doesn’t like to leave his side, her arm possessively around his waist at social gatherings such as a buffet dinner last July at Ronald Perelman’s East Hampton estate, where I saw the two of them navigating the A-list crowd joined at the hip. Manhattan hostesses have long known that if they invite the Giulianis to dinner, they must be prepared to breach protocol by seating them not only at the same table but next to each other, and Rudy’s standard lecture contract explicitly requires that his wife be placed beside him in case his appearance involves sitting through a meal.

It’s no surprise to veteran Rudy watchers that in recent weeks, senior presidential-campaign operatives have apparently been grumbling about what they consider Judith’s meddling in matters outside her areas of competence. “She’s, uh, feisty, as they say,” a high-level supporter told Newsday. “The staff people go a little nuts.”

The story of Manny Papir is a cautionary tale for anyone who doubts that Judith Giuliani is a force to be reckoned with. Papir, Rudy’s longtime personal aide, learned the hard way during a trip to Europe when Rudy, taking a 9/11 victory lap in early 2002, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and then was honored with the German Media Prize in Baden-Baden. Among Rudy’s inner circle, Judith was fast becoming known for her demanding requirements. Even loyalist Sunny Mindel was overheard joking that whenever they arranged a chartered jet for their principal and his companion, “we need two seats for Judith—one for her and one for her Gucci bag.” (“I have no recollection of saying that,” Mindel says.)

When Judith asked to stay two nights in Baden-Baden instead of the previously planned one—throwing the intricate schedule into disarray—Papir, who was advancing Rudy’s triumphal tour, made the mistake of betraying his impatience. Running into other members of the entourage in the lobby, he muttered, “Let me guess—you’re waiting for Princess, too.” When the quip was reported back to Rudy and Judith, Papir—who declined to comment—was out of a $200,000-a-year job.

McKeon dismisses the complaints, arguing that Judith is not trying to be a political strategist. “It comes from people who are not on the inside of the campaign. Maybe that’s why they’re grumbling,” he says. “Judith is nothing but an asset, and, as the campaign continues, she’s going to be a larger and larger asset.”

Her early work on the stump has been marred by occasional gaffes, but he calls her “an experienced public speaker” and says there are no plans to get her a speechwriter. “Her primary role is as a support system for Rudy in a personal way and as a character witness for him in a public way. She knows him as a man, as a husband, and as a good person, and that’s what she’ll be talking about. She’ll be one of our key surrogates.”

Judith Giuliani was introduced to the public by the tabloids. But that experience did not fully prepare her for the current one. Friends describe a woman who is hurt and baffled—“freaked out,” says one—by the barrage of coverage of her first marriage and the fact that long ago, her job had her demonstrating surgical-stapling procedures on live dogs.

Candice Stark, who’s known Judith for twenty years, believes that she’s a target of opportunity. “I read these things in the newspaper trying to trash her, trying to make her seem like something that she’s not, and I think it’s just people looking for anything they can to take Rudy down,” she theorizes. “Everything about his life is so well known they can’t dig much further, so they’re going after her instead. So much of politics is cruel. You’ve got to be strong.”

A confidant of Judith’s from the Hamptons, where the Giulianis paid $3 million for a 6,000-square-foot shingled house in Water Mill, complete with swimming pool, wine cellar, and cigar room, argues that she’s been unfairly caricatured. “This is a woman, a single mother, who has struggled most of her life, and she married somebody not because he was famous or because she thought he would be the president but because she was in love with him,” the friend says. “Now she’s very worried that something she will do or say will hurt his opportunity. She loses sleep over it. Reading in the newspapers that she’s a liability has been very, very hard for her.”

The friend added, “I think Rudy’s the one that’s sabotaging her. He’s out of control. There’s too much hand-holding and kissing on the lips, behaving like a couple of 18-year-olds in their first love affair. She doesn’t have the political smarts, and I don’t think she expected any of this.” (Like many people interviewed for this article, this friend asked for anonymity. “No good deed goes unpunished,” explained Howard Koeppel, declining to share his impressions of the mayor’s then-girlfriend, who was a frequent visitor after Rudy moved out of Gracie Mansion to bunk with Koeppel and his domestic partner, Mark Hsiao.)

Republican fund-raiser and Manhattan hostess Georgette Mosbacher—the ex-wife of Texas oilman Robert Mosbacher, who was Commerce secretary under the first President Bush—is a new member of Judith’s social circle, along with Walters and Beverly Sills. All three were Judith’s guests in December at an intimate ladies’ lunch at the Giulianis’ East 66th Street co-op off Madison Avenue. “It’s a tough role—I’ve been there,” says the flame-haired Mosbacher. “For me, it was horrible, devastating. You don’t want to hurt your husband, and everything you do reflects on him. You become hypersensitive and you try to be what you think the press wants you to be so they won’t come after you. But you learn pretty quick—at least I did—that you can’t win that way. In the end, you gotta be yourself.”

Judith, who had been Rudy’s constant companion during early campaign swings in New Hampshire, has more recently stayed behind and lowered her profile—and Rudy has urged reporters to cut her some slack, pointing out that “I am a candidate. She’s a civilian, to use the old Mafia distinction.”

When I ran into Rudy at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner in late April, he told me Judith skipped the event because “she’s up taking care of our daughter [Whitney] at Skidmore.” The locution “our daughter” was hardly calculated to repair his frayed relations with the biological children he shares with Hanover, especially 17-year-old Trinity-prep-school senior Caroline, who uses Donna’s surname and reportedly didn’t bother telling him when she was accepted recently by Harvard. (“In the next few months, Rudy really has to repair his relationships with Andrew and Caroline,” says a Republican strategist. “He can’t be the Republican nominee and have his kids estranged from him. That ain’t gonna cut it.”)

As for the brickbats Judith has been absorbing of late, “I tell her it’s just like when I was mayor and every day people want to disagree with your policies and criticize you,” he said. “Over time, you get used to it.”

The Analysis: I wrote a poem to commemorate the event:

Rudi and Judi sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First came the homewrecking hussy,
Next came state-defined love,
Then a 9/11 baby sprouted out of that whores undercarriage.

For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Perfectionist Sluts Too!

The Article: For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too by Sara Rimer in the New York Times. If you ever cared to learn about the terribly stressful lives of over-privileged white bitches, here’s your chance!

The Text: NEWTON, Mass., March 31 — To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.

“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.

“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”

Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?

“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”

They both burst out laughing.

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive mood in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé. For Esther, as for high school seniors everywhere, this is a big weekend for finding out how your résumé measured up: The college acceptances, and rejections, are rolling in.

“You want to achieve,” Esther said. “But how do you achieve and still be genuine?”

If it all seems overwhelming at times, then the multitasking adults in Newton have the answer: Balance. Strive for balance.

But balance is out the window when you’re a high-achieving senior in the home stretch of the race for which all the years of achieving and the disciplined focusing on the future have been preparing you. These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.

“You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater,” said another of Esther’s 17-year-old classmates, Julie Mhlaba, who aspires to medical school and juggles three Advanced Placement classes, gospel choir and a part-time job as a waitress. “You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.”

“You’re supposed to do all these things,” Julie said, “and not go insane.”

Stress Trumps Relaxation

Newton, which has a population of almost 84,000, is known for a liberal sensibility and a high concentration of professionals like doctors, lawyers and academics. Six miles west of Boston, with its heavily settled neighborhoods, bustling downtowns and high numbers of immigrants, Newton is a suburb with an urban feel.

The main shopping area, in Newton Centre, is a concrete manifestation of the conflicting messages Esther and the other girls are constantly struggling to decode. In one five-block stretch are two Starbucks and one Peets Coffee & Tea, several psychotherapists’ offices, three SAT test-prep services, two after-school math programs, and three yoga studios promising relaxation and inner peace.

Smack in the middle of all of this is Esther’s church, the 227-year-old First Baptist, which welcomes everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation or denomination, and where Esther puts in a lot of time.

The test-prep business is booming. Kaplan (“Be the ideal college applicant!”) is practically around the corner from Chyten (“Our average SAT II score across all subjects is 720!”), which is three blocks from Princeton Review (“We’re all about scoring more!”). My First Yoga (for children 3 and up), with its founder playing up her Harvard degree, is conveniently located above Chyten, which includes the SAT Cafe.

High-priced SAT prep has become almost routine at schools like Newton North. Not to hire the extra help is practically an act of rebellion.

“I think it’s unfair,” Esther said, explaining why she decided against an SAT tutor, though she worried about her score (ultimately getting, as she put it, “above 2000”). “Why do I deserve this leg up?”

Parents view Newton’s expensive real estate — the median house price in 2006 was $730,000 — and high taxes as the price of admission to the prized public schools. There are less affluent parents, small-business owners, carpenters, plumbers, social workers and high school guidance counselors, but many of these families arrived decades ago when it was possible to buy a nice two-story Colonial for $150,000 or less.

Newton North, one of two outstanding public high schools here, is known for its academic rigor, but also its vocational education, reflecting the wide range of its 1,967 students. Nearly 73 percent of them are white, 7.3 percent black, nearly 12 percent Asian and 7.5 percent Hispanic. Many of the black and Hispanic students live in the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, and are bused in under a 35-year-old voluntary integration program.

Newton North has a student theater, winning athletic teams and dozens of after-school clubs (ultimate Frisbee, mock trial, black leadership, Hispanic culture, Israeli dance). There is an emphasis on nonconformity — even if it is often conformity dressed up as nonconformity — and an absence of such high school conventions as, say, homecoming queens, valedictorians and class rankings.

‘Superhuman’ Resistance

Jennifer Price, the Newton North principal, said she and her faculty emphasized to students that they could win admission to many excellent colleges without organizing their entire lives around résumé building. By age 14, Ms. Price said, the school’s highest fliers are already worrying about marketing themselves to colleges: “You almost have to be superhuman to resist the pressure.”

If more students aren’t listening to the message that they can relax a bit, one reason may be that a lot of the people delivering the message went to the elite colleges. Ms. Price has an undergraduate degree from Princeton — she makes a point of saying that she got in because she was recruited to play varsity field hockey — and is a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Many of the teachers have degrees from the Ivy League and other elite schools.

But the message also tends to get drowned out when parents bump into each other at Whole Foods and share news about whose son or daughter just got accepted (or not) at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Penn or Stanford.

Or when the final edition of the award-winning student newspaper, the Newtonite, comes out every June, with its two-page spread listing all the seniors, and their colleges. For that entire week, Esther says, everyone pores over the names, obsessing about who is going where.

“In a lot of ways, it’s all about that one week,” she said.

There is something about the lives these girls lead — their jam-packed schedules, the amped-up multitasking, the focus on a narrow group of the nation’s most selective colleges — that speaks of a profound anxiety in the young people, but perhaps even more so in their parents, about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton.

Admission to a brand-name college is viewed by many parents, and their children, as holding the best promise of professional success and economic well-being in an increasingly competitive world.

“It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up,” Kat said.

Esther, however, is aiming for a decidedly nonlucrative profession. Inspired by her father, Greg Mobley, who is a Biblical scholar, she wants to be a theologian.

She says she is interested in “Scripture, the Bible, the development of organized religion, thinking about all this, writing about all this, teaching about all this.” More than anything else, she wrote in an e-mail message, she wants to be a writer, “and religion is what I most like to write about.”

“I have such a strong sense of being supported by my faith,” she continued. “It gives me priorities. That’s why I’m not concerned about making money, because I know that there is so much more to living a rich life than having money.”

First Baptist Church counts on Esther. She organizes pancake suppers, tutors a young congregant and helps lead the youth group’s outreach to the poor.

On a springlike Sunday afternoon toward the end of winter, Esther could be found with her father, her two brothers and members of her youth group handing out food to homeless people on Boston Common. She had spent the morning in church.

About 2 p.m., a text message flashed across her cellphone from Gabe Gladstone, a co-captain of mock trial: “Where are you?” Esther, a key member of the group, was needed at a meeting.

Esther messaged back: “I’m feeding the homeless, I’ll come when God’s work is done.”

Fending Off ‘Anorexia of the Soul’

On a Saturday afternoon in late November, Esther and her mother, Page Kelley, sat at the dining room table talking about the contradictions and complexities of life in Newton. Esther’s father was with his sons, Gregory, 15, who plays varsity basketball for Newton North, and Tommy, 10, coaching Tommy’s basketball team.

Ms. Kelley, 47, an assistant federal public defender, and Mr. Mobley, 49, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, grew up in Kentucky and came north for college. Ms. Kelley is a graduate of Smith College and Harvard Law School. Mr. Mobley has two graduate degrees from Harvard.

Amid all the competitiveness and consumerism, and the obsession with achievement in Newton, Ms. Kelley said, “You just hope your child doesn’t have anorexia of the soul.”

“It’s the idea that you end up with this strange drive,” she continued. “One of the great things about Esther is that she does have some kind of spiritual life. You just hope your kid has good priorities. We keep saying to her: ‘The name of the college you go to doesn’t matter. There are a lot of good colleges out there.’ ”

Esther said her mother is her role model. “I think the work she does is very noble,” she said.

“She has these impressive degrees,” Esther said, “and she chooses to do something where she’s not making as much money as she could.”

As close as mother and daughter are, there is one important generational divide. “My mother applied to one college,” Esther said. “She got in, she went.”

Back from basketball practice with his sons, Mr. Mobley joined the conversation. To Mr. Mobley, a formalized, competitive culture pervades everything from youth sports to getting into college. He pointed out to his wife that the lives of their three children were far more directed “than any of the aimless hours I spent in my youth daydreaming and meandering.”

Ms. Kelley asked, “Is that because of us?”

“Yes — and no,” he said. “It’s because of 2006 in America, and the Northeast.”

The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation, he said: “Our children start where we finished.”

As the afternoon turned into early evening, Esther went out to meet her best friend, Aliza Edelstein. The family dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Bandit, was underfoot, trolling for affection.

“I’m not worried about Esther because I know her,” Mr. Mobley said. “Esther’s character is sealed in some fundamental way.”

Ms. Kelley, however, wondered aloud: “Don’t you worry that she never rebelled? When I was growing up, you were supposed to rebel.”

But she acknowledged that she had sent her own mixed signals. “As I’m sitting here saying I don’t care what kind of grades she gets, I’m thinking, she comes home with a B, and I say: ‘What’d you get a B for? Who gave you a B? I’m going to talk to them.’

“You do want your child to do well.”

Mr. Mobley nodded. “We’re not above it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

On a Fierce Mission to Shine

To sit in on classes with Esther in her vibrant high school where, between classes, the central corridor, called Main Street, is a bustling social hub, is to see why these students are genuinely excited about school.

Their teachers are pushing them to wrestle with big questions: What is truth? What does Virgil’s “Aeneid” tell us about destiny and individual happiness? How does DNA work? How is the global economy reshaping the world (subtext: you have to be fluid and highly educated to survive in the new economy)?

Esther’s ethics teacher, Joel Greifinger, spent considerable time this winter on moral theories. An examination of John Rawls’s theory of justice led to extensive discussions about American society and class inequality. Among the reading material Mr. Greifinger presented was research showing the correlation between income and SAT scores.

The class strengthened Esther’s earlier decision not to take private SAT prep.

In her honors philosophy/literature class, Esther has been reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, “Sophie’s Choice” and Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Amid a discussion of the strangely unsettling emptiness Frankl encountered upon his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Esther quoted Sartre: “You are condemned to freedom.”

Her honors teacher, Mike Fieleke, nodded. “That’s the existential idea. If we don’t awaken to that freedom, then we are slaves to our fate.”

A few weeks earlier, Esther, taking stock of her own life, wrote in an e-mail message: “I feel like I’m on the verge. I feel like I’m just about to get out of high school, to enter into adulthood, to reach some kind of state of independence and peacefulness and enlightenment.”

More immediately, she wrote, Mr. Fieleke had told her “he thought, from reading my papers and hearing me speak in class, that I was just on the verge of some really great idea.”

“I asked him if he thought that idea would come by next Wednesday, when our big Hamlet paper was due. He said I might feel this way all year long.”

The most intensely pressurized academic force field at school is the one surrounding the students on the Advanced Placement and honors track. About 145 of the 500 seniors are taking a combined total of three, four and five Advanced Placement and honors classes, with a few students even juggling six and seven.

Esther’s friend Colby takes four Advanced Placement and one honors class. “I’m living up to my own expectations,” Colby said. “It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.”

Another of Esther’s friends, from student theater, Lee Gerstenhaber, 17, was juggling four Advanced Placement classes with intense late-night rehearsals for her starring role as Maggie, the seductive Southern belle in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” It was too much. About 4 a.m one day last fall, she was still fighting her way through Advanced Placement physics homework. She dissolved in tears.

“I had always been able to do it before,” Lee recalled later. “But I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m not Superwoman.’ ”

She dropped physics — and was incandescent as Maggie.

Esther’s schedule includes two Advanced Placement and one honors class. Among certain of her classmates who are mindful that many elite colleges advise prospective applicants to pursue the most rigorous possible course of study, taking two Advanced Placement classes is viewed as “only two A.P.’s.” But Esther says she is simply taking the subjects she is most interested in.

She also shrugged off advice that it would look better on her résumé to take another science class instead of her passion, A.P. Latin. Like so many of her classmates, Esther started taking Latin in the seventh grade, when everyone was saying Latin would help them with the SAT. But now, except for Esther and a handful of other diehards who are devoted to Latin — and to their teacher, Robert Mitchell — everyone else has moved on.

“I like languages,” said Esther, who also takes Advanced Placement Spanish. “And I really like Latin.”

Who Needs a Boyfriend?

This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’ ” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better.”

Esther turned to Colby: she seems to pretty much always have a boyfriend.

“I never felt like having a boyfriend was a burden,” Colby said. “I enjoy just being comfortable with someone, being able to spend time together. I don’t think that means I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident without one.”

Esther said: “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing. I’m like you. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ ”

But who needs a boyfriend? “My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends,” Esther wrote in an e-mail message. “I mean, girlfriends last longer.”

Boyfriends or not, a deeper question for Esther and Colby is how they negotiate their identities as young women. They have grown up watching their mothers, and their friends’ mothers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point.

They say they want to be both feminine and assertive, like their mothers. But Colby made the point at lunch that she would rather be considered too assertive and less conventionally feminine than “be totally passive and a bystander in my life.”

Esther agreed. She said she admired Cristina, the spunky resident on “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of her favorite TV shows.

“She really stands up for herself and knows who she is, which I aspire to,” Esther said.

Cristina is also “gorgeous,” Esther laughed. “And when she’s taking off her scrubs, she’s always wearing cute lingerie.”

Speaking of lingerie, part of being feminine is feeling good about how you look. Esther is not trying to be one of Newton North’s trendsetters, the girls who show up every day in Ugg boots, designer jeans — or equally cool jeans from the vintage store — and tight-fitting tank tops under the latest North Face jacket.

She never looks “scrubby,” to use the slang for being a slob, but sometimes comes to school in sweats and moccasins.

“I think sometimes I might be trying a little too hard not to conform,” Esther says.

She says she is one of the few girls in her circle who doesn’t have a credit card. But she is hardly immune to the pressure to be a good consumer.

During the discussion around the dining room table, Esther’s mother expressed her astonishment over her daughter’s expertise in designer jeans. They had been people-watching at the mall. Esther, as it turned out, knew the brand of every pair of jeans that went by.

So what were the coolest jeans at Newton North?

“The coolest jeans are True Religions,” Esther said.

“They look,” she said, and here she smiled sheepishly as she stood up to reveal her denim-clad legs, “like these.”

Aliza and several of Esther’s other friends chipped in to buy them for her 17th birthday, in November.

Encouraged to Ease Up a Little

The amazing boys say they admire girls like Esther and Colby.

“I hate it when girls dumb themselves down,” Gabe Gladstone, the co-captain of mock trial, was saying one morning to the other captain, Cameron Ferrey.

Cameron said he felt the same way.

One of Esther’s close friends is Dan Catomeris, a school theater star. “One of the most attractive things about Esther is how smart she is,” said Dan, whose mother is a professor at Harvard Business School. “There’s always been this intellectual tension between us. I see why she likes Kierkegaard — he’s existential, but still Christian. She really likes Descartes. I was not so into Descartes. I really like Hume, Nietzsche, the existentialist authors. The musician we’re most collectively into is Bob Dylan.”

Sometimes, though, everybody wants some of these hard-charging girls to chill out. Tom DePeter, an Advanced Placement English teacher, wants his students to loosen up so they can write original sentences. The theater director, Adam Brown, wants the girls to “let go” in auditions.

Peter Martin, the girls’ cross-country coach, says girls try so hard to please everyone — coaches, teachers, parents — that he bends over backward not to criticize them. “I tell them, ‘Just go out and run.’ ” His team wins consistently.

But how do you chill out and still get into a highly selective college?

One of Esther’s favorite rituals is to hang out at her house with Aliza, eating Ben and Jerry’s and watching a DVD of a favorite program like “The Office.” Their friendship helped Esther and Aliza keep going last fall, when there was hardly time to hang out. Esther recalled in an e-mail message how one night she had telephoned Aliza, who is also a top student, and a cross-country team captain, to say she was feeling overwhelmed.

“I said, ‘Aliza, this is crazy, I have so much homework to do, and I won’t be able to relax until I do it all. I haven’t gone out in weeks!’ And Aliza (who had also been staying in on Fridays and Saturdays to do homework) pointed out: ‘I’d rather get into college.’ ”

By Dec. 15, Newton North was in a frenzy over early admissions answers. Esther’s friend Phoebe Gardener had been accepted to Dartmouth. Her friend Dan Lurie was in at Brown. Harvard wanted Dan Catomeris.

Esther was in calculus class, the last period of the day when her cellphone rang. It was her father. The letter from Williams College — her ideal of the small, liberal arts school — had arrived.

Her father would be at her brother’s basketball game when she got home. Her mother would still be at the office. Esther did not want to be alone when she opened the letter.

“Dad, can you bring it to school?” she asked.

Ten minutes later, when her father arrived, Esther realized that he had somehow not registered the devastating thinness of the envelope. The admissions office was sorry. Williams had had a record number of highly qualified applicants for early admission this year. Esther had been rejected. Not deferred. Rejected.

Her father hugged her as she cried outside her classroom, and then he drove her home.

Esther said several days later: “Maybe it hurt me that I wasn’t an athlete.”

But she was already moving on. “I chose Williams,” she said, with a shrug. “They didn’t choose me back.”

About that thin envelope: Mr. Mobley, unschooled in such intricacies, said he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had wanted so much for his daughter to get into Williams, he said, and believed so strongly in her, that it was as if he had wished the letter into being an acceptance.

“It was a setback,” Mr. Mobley said weeks later. “But it’s not a failure.”

And Then One Day, a Letter Arrives

Has this all been a temporary insanity?

Esther’s friend Colby learned in February that she had been accepted at the University of Southern California. Soon, more letters of acceptance rolled in: from the University of Miami, the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane. With the college-application pressure behind her, she can go back to being the pragmatic romantic who opened her journal last August and wrote her “life list,” with 35 goals and dreams, in pink ink.

She wants: To write a novel. Own a (red) Jeep Wrangler. Get into college. Name her firstborn daughter Carmen. Go to carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Learn to surf. Live in a Spanish-speaking country. Learn to play the doppio movimiento of Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat. Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced.

In mid-January Esther was thrilled to receive an acceptance letter from Centre College, one of her fallback schools, in Kentucky. But she was still dreaming about her remaining top choices: Amherst, Middlebury, Davidson and Smith, her mother’s alma mater.

Esther’s application to Smith included a letter from her father. He wrote about how, when Esther was a baby, they had gone to his wife’s 10th college reunion. He described the alumni parade as an “angelic procession of women in white, decade by decade, at every stage in the course of human life.”

He wrote about seeing the young women, the middle-aged graduates and, finally, “the elderly women, some with the assistance of canes and wheelchairs, but with no diminution of the confidence that a great education brings.”

“I still remember holding Esther as we watched those saints go marching into the central campus for the commencement ceremony,” he wrote.

“Lord,” he concluded, and he could have been talking about any of the schools his daughter still has her heart set on, “I want Esther to be in that number.”

The Analysis: We’re all a little dumber and possibly humbler to have read a full length article on the strenuous lives of the annoying WASP’s and JAP’s that populate New England (grade inflation much?). I’ll be using this as evidence when I go on trial for giving the Chinese a map of NYU to firebomb.

The Dark Side Of Dark People

The Article: You know, thank god for Pat Buchanan. Everyday a new problem arises in our society and it has become exceedingly difficult to blame it on the non-white masses who pollute our country. Thankfully, Pat stepped up to the plate once again in an opinion piece called ‘The Dark Side of Diversity’ in which he rails against immigration / immigrants (the BROWN/BLACK kind) for all of the prolific shootings and violence we’ve incurred, including the recent Virginia Tech massacre.

The Text: Since the massacre of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, the mainstream media have obsessed over the fact the crazed gunmen was able to buy a Glock in the state of Virginia.

Little attention has been paid to the Richmond legislators who voted to make “Hokie Nation,” a Middle American campus of 26,000 kids, a gun-free zone where only the madman had a semi-automatic.

Almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Cho Seung-Hui was not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien. Had this deranged young man who secretly hated us never come here, 32 people would heading home from Blacksburg for summer vacation.

What was Cho doing here? How did he get in?

Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which threw the nation’s doors open to the greatest invasion in history, an invasion opposed by a majority of our people. Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst.

Cho was one of them.

In stories about him, we learn he had no friends, rarely spoke, and was a loner, isolated from classmates and roommates. Cho was the alien in Hokie Nation. And to vent his rage at those with whom he could not communicate, he decided to kill in cold blood dozens of us.

What happened in Blacksburg cannot be divorced from what’s been happening to America since the immigration act brought tens of millions of strangers to these shores, even as the old bonds of national community began to disintegrate and dissolve in the social revolutions of the 1960s.

To intellectuals, what makes America a nation is ideas — ideas in the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

But documents no matter how eloquent and words no matter how lovely do not a nation make. Before 1970, we were a people, a community, a country. Students would have said aloud of Cho: “Who is this guy? What’s the matter with him?”

Teachers would have taken action to get him help — or get him out.

Since the 1960s, we have become alienated from one another even as millions of strangers arrive every year. And as Americans no longer share the old ties of history, heritage, faith, language, tradition, culture, music, myth or morality, how can immigrants share those ties?

Many immigrants do not assimilate. Many do not wish to. They seek community in their separate subdivisions of our multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual mammoth mall of a nation. And in numbers higher than our native born, some are going berserk here.

The 1993 bombers of the World Trade Center and the killers of 9-11 were all immigrants or illegals. Colin Ferguson, the Jamaican who massacred six and wounded 19 in an anti-white shooting spree on the Long Island Railroad, was an illegal. John Lee Malvo, the Beltway Sniper, was flotsam from the Caribbean.

Angel Resendez, the border-jumping rapist who killed at least nine women, was an illegal alien. Julio Gonzalez, who burned down the Happy Land social club in New York, killing 87, arrived in the Mariel boatlift.

Ali Hassan Abu Kama, who wounded seven, killing one, in a rampage on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, was a Palestinian. As was Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy.

The rifleman who murdered two
CIA employees at the McLean, Va., headquarters was a Pakistani. When Chai Vang, a Hmong, was told by a party of Wisconsin hunters to vacate their deer stand, he shot six to death. Peter Odighizuwa, the gunman who killed the dean, a teacher and a student at the Appalachian School of Law, was a Nigerian.

Hesham Hadayet, who shot up the El Al counter at LAX, killing two and wounding four, was an Egyptian immigrant. Gamil al-Batouti, the copilot who yelled, “I put my faith in Allah’s hands,” as he crashed his plane into the Atlantic after departing JFK Airport, killing 217, was an Egyptian.

Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, the UNC graduate who ran his SUV over nine people on Chapel Hill campus and said he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah,” was an Iranian.

Juan Corona, who murdered 25 people in California to be ranked with the likes of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, was a Mexican.

Where does one find such facts? On VDARE.com, a Website that covers the dark side of diversity covered up by a politically correct media, which seem to believe it is socially unhealthy for us Americans to see any correlation at all between mass migrations and mass murder.

“In our diversity is our strength!” So we are endlessly lectured.

But are we really a better, safer, freer, happier, more united and caring country than we were before, against our will, we became what Theodore Roosevelt called “a polyglot boarding house for the world.”

Analysis: Dey took der jobs has morphed into dey shert our white peoples! How impressive, coming from Pat “I lost someone in the Holocaust too, my grandfather fell off the watchtower” Buchanan.

Washington Post or the Onion?

The Article: An article in today’s Washington Post by Sam Ghattas entitled “Hezbollah Praises Israeli Report on War”. Oh, really, Mr. Washington Post, what other obvious factoids do you have to report on? Sky is blue, life is hard, and Dick Cheney gets a massive erection every time a brown person dies?

The Text: Hezbollah’s leader praised an Israeli government report that said Israel’s summer war against the guerrillas was a failure. But the Lebanese government criticized the findings, saying the report did not address the massive destruction wrought on this country.

The conflicting comments Wednesday from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Prime Minister Fuad Saniora underlined Lebanon’s own internal political struggle between the militant group and the U.S.-backed government.

Nasrallah, who also criticized his own government’s handling of the war, said the Israeli commission reviewing the Lebanon war vindicated his claim that Israel had been defeated.

“The first important outcome of this commission is that it has finally and officially decided the issue of victory and defeat,” Nasrallah said.

But he also gave his enemy unprecedented praise.

“It is worthy of respect that an investigative commission appointed by (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert condemns him,” Nasrallah told a crowd at the opening of a book fair in a south Beirut neighborhood complex that was rebuilt after being leveled by Israeli warplanes during the summer fighting.

“Even though they’re our enemies, it is worthy of respect that the political forces and the Israeli public act quickly to save their state, entity, army and their existence from the crisis,” the Shiite Muslim cleric added.

The 34-day war against Hezbollah guerrillas, during which more than 1,000 Lebanese and nearly 160 Israelis died, has been widely perceived in Israel as a failure. The report said Olmert bore ultimate responsibility, accusing him of poor judgment, hasty decision-making and lack of vision, fueling reports that he may be forced to step down.

In a tough blow to Olmert, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called on him to resign. Livni, who enjoys wide public support, also said she would challenge Olmert for leadership of the governing Kadima Party.

Olmert said he intended to stay on to remedy the severe flaws in decision-making and crisis management that a government war probe identified the report.

Nasrallah’s remarks may have been attempt to steer attention away from the dramatic political events unfolding in Israel. Any inflammatory remarks by the Hezbollah leader could buoy Olmert, who faces calls to step down from within his own coalition and has been working feverishly to retain his hold on power since the report’s release earlier this week.

Saniora, meanwhile, did not offer any praise for Israel and instead called on the deeply divided Lebanon to unite. He warned that Israel could be planning future attacks to restore its credibility.

“I call on my Lebanese brothers to unite in the face of what Israel might be seeking to launch against Lebanon,” Saniora said.

Saniora’s government has been facing a campaign by the Hezbollah-led opposition to force it to resign. Hezbollah officials accused the majority of conniving with the Israelis to destroy the pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian guerrillas.

The U.S.-backed Saniora has refused to step down and has demanded that the state should have the sole monopoly on weapons _ a tacit allusion to the ultimate need for Hezbollah to disarm.

Saniora criticized the Israeli report for failing to address the destruction, estimated at more than $5 billion, inflicted on Lebanon by the Israeli air and naval bombardment as well as the ground incursion during the war.

The report on the “unjust war … did not make a single mention of the massive material, human losses and destruction Israel inflicted on Lebanon,” Saniora said.

Nasrallah also took issue with the Lebanese government, which he claims has not taken the steps to investigate its side of conflict.

“When the enemy entity acts honestly and sincerely even if its cause is unjust we cannot but respect it, especially when we look at the other (Lebanese) side which does not investigate, does not study and does not hold (anyone) accountable and does not form investigative commissions as if nothing has happened,” he said.

The militant Hezbollah leader, whose group came under criticism by some Arab governments early on in the fight for triggering the war when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12, also lamented the divisions within his country and the region.

“It is regretful that we the Arab world and Lebanon are waiting for an Israeli commission to settle for us this dispute and to tell us ‘seriously you have won and we (Israelis) were defeated,'” Nasrallah said.

Analysis: Wow, do we all feel a little bit stupider for having read that? What’s next, an expose by the Iraqi Information Minister of the Saddam Era with a report on how Muhammed is going to drop magic rain on the American Zionist European Colonizers while Olmert bathes himself in the blood of Lebanese children and negative popularity? Though I’m thoroughly impressed that Sam Ghattas could get an article published in the Washington Post to that effect. Next time you want to write if the Red Sox like beating the Yankees, give me a call, I got plenty of fill in the blank answers for your future columns.

And if you’re actually interested in an interesting exploration of this topic, check out On the Face on local reaction, A Blog For All on the Israeli protests, and an extensive post on the crisis faced at the Olmert government. Because god knows you won’t get it from the Post.

Double Burn

The Article: Rush to Judgment by James Wolcott of Vanity Fair details how Rush Limbaugh “attacking environmentalists as hippie-dip “wackos” who care more about spotted owls than people and use polar bears for propaganda, Rush Limbaugh has blinded millions of Americans to the climate crisis.”

The Text: Rush Limbaugh, he’s got the life. His days flick through the slot like postcards from paradise. Where most gab-show hosts report for duty at radio studios where candy bars get stuck in the vending machine and the carpeting is a certain industrial shade of indifference, Limbaugh—a man, a mission, a mighty wind—has carved out his own principality in Florida’s Palm Beach, a lion preserve where he can roam undisturbed. Drinking in the rays, puffing on those big-shot cigars, riding the range in a golf cart—he’s got the complete Jackie Gleason how-sweet-it-is package deal. But just as the Great One suffered from melancholia aggravated by alcohol, Limbaugh’s indulgence in his own creature comforts hasn’t been able to insulate him from the demons within. An addiction to painkillers reduced this human boom box of self-sufficiency and strict enforcement—”If people are violating the law by doing drugs,” he once lectured on his syndicated TV show, “they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up” (up the river, that is)—to the furtive, needy ploys of any other junkie who finds the medicine cabinet running dry. After he entered rehab, his third wife, Marta, reportedly vacated the luxury estate (they would later divorce), leaving Rush a Tarzan without his Jane in what the Palm Beach Post in 2004 called his “$24.2 million, 36,500-square-foot secluded monster at 1495 N. Ocean.” Secluded for now, but perhaps after this god of the airwaves shucks his mound of flesh so that his soul can meet Reagan’s in Republican Heaven (where all the angels look like June Allyson), his compound can be converted into a tourist attraction—a combination museum, shrine, gift shop, and spiritual mecca modeled on Elvis’s Graceland, Dolly Parton’s Dollywood. Aging dittoheads can make pilgrimages to pay their respects, rekindle fond memories, and gape reverently at the silenced TV where Rush watched the game he loved so much and understood so little, football.

For us non-dittoheads (that is, the unconverted), a more fitting memorial to Mount Rushbo might be a diorama of the environmental destruction that he did so much to enable in his multi-decade reign of denigration. Global warming’s most popular denialist, talk radio’s most imitated showman, conservatism’s minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.

From Teddy Roosevelt, who made wilderness protection a priority and created national parks, bird sanctuaries, big-game refuges, and national forests, to Richard Nixon, under whose bad-moon presidency the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and the Clean Air Act of 1970 was passed, the Republican Party carried a tradition of conservation that crumbled under Ronald Reagan, for whom nature was mostly a scenic backdrop whose resources could be exploited out of camera frame. Reagan’s selections of James Watt for the Department of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch for the E.P.A. put bureaucratic vandals in positions of stewardship, and in 1987 he vetoed re-authorization of the Clean Water Act, a veto that fortunately was overridden. It is a measure of how awful the George W. Bush administration has been on the environment that some activists miss the old, upfront hostility of the Reagan era, when at least the political and corporate machinations took place in open daylight. “Unfortunately, now,” lamented Daniel Weiss, an environmental activist (quoted by Amanda Griscom in her article for online’s Grist), “our leaders are much more savvy—and far more insidious. They undo laws in the dead of night.” Under Bush II, environmentalists no longer need to be engaged, because they’ve been so stridently marginalized and stigmatized as a pantheistic kook cult practicing socialism under the guise of Gaia worship. This was largely Limbaugh’s doing, and now every right-wing pundit from Cal Thomas to Michael Savage croaks the same tune.

It was Limbaugh who inscribed the term “environmentalist wackos” into the political lexicon and hung the “loser” tag on them. He caricatured the fight for wildlife preservation—a broad-visioned tradition that spans from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson to Edward Abbey to David Brower—into something weedily hippie-dip. In his 1992 debut, The Way Things Ought to Be, Limbaugh fobbed himself off with a faux barefoot humility over how far he had come in his Horatio Alger saga, the book’s cover photo presenting him as a chubby-cheeked cherub with a grinning hint of mischief—a “lovable little fuzzball,” to use his own pet phrase. “I am in awe of the perfection of the earth,” he proclaimed inside, a perfection crafted by the Creator who made us all, draping the stars in the firmament like the ultimate interior decorator. For all his wide-eyed wonderment, Limbaugh fashioned himself as less naïve than the stereotypical “long-haired maggot-infested FM-type environmentalist wacko” whom he professes to have reasoned with over the plight of the spotted owl, Rush’s ineluctable train of logic leading to the final junction: “If the owl can’t adapt to the superiority of humans, screw it.” It was during this early, jaunty period of Rush’s fame that the theme music for his “Animal Rights Update” was the title song from Andy Williams’s Born Free punctuated by gunfire and animal sounds—the perfect soundtrack for Dick Cheney hunting porn. Limbaugh acknowledged in The Way Things Ought to Be that there were “some decent environmentalists” out there, they weren’t all maggot-infested mulletheads, but portrayed even the sincere ones as socioeconomic parasites. “You and I and the vast majority of other people work for a living,” he wrote. “Most of the people running environmental groups don’t work.” They simply pass around the collection plate to support their cushy lifestyles. As demonization goes, that’s pretty mild.

With the follow-up, cash-in collection, See, I Told You So (1993), Limbaugh put aside any puckish pretense of modesty and exulted in pure gloat. Having a mega-best-seller will do that to your glands. His environmental chapter here is largely a rehash of the environmentalist-wacko section in The Way Things Ought to Be (once again he highlights how wrong Dr. Paul Ehrlich got it with The Population Bomb, in 1968, where Ehrlich prophesied that the 70s would be a massive die-in of disaster-movie proportions—a Malthusian vision of mass starvation), one of its few original additions being the introduction of a new bête noire and butt of humor that goes by the handle of Algore. Converting the name of then vice president Al Gore, whose green tract Earth in the Balance was published in 1992 (retitled by Limbaugh Earth in the Lurch), into shorthand for the entire environmental movement was a neat rhetorical trick, pinning a note of absurdity onto every mention of his crusade. “Even though quite a few scientists are now backtracking on their once-dire predictions of melting ice caps and worldwide flooding, Algore and a few hard-line doomsayers are sticking to their thermostats.” Since the publication of See, I Told You So, the “once-dire predictions of melting ice caps” have become more dire. Similarly, Limbaugh scoffed in See, I Told You So, “Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming”—a blithe distortion then (as if Limbaugh could ID the difference between a “pseudo-scientist” and the genuine article) and a ludicrous one now, given the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that climate change is real, unfolding, and momentous.

If Algore is sticking to his thermostat, Limbaugh is refusing to let go of his icicle. His answer to global warming is to snort, How can there be global warming when it’s so fricking cold out?—a snowflake just fell on somebody’s head! On his TV show in 1994, he mocked, “Environmentalist wackos of the past three years have been talking about global warming, and they’ve been suggesting that the Earth is warming to the point that [mock crying] ‘we’re all going to die. We’re all going to melt. We’re going to burn,’ and we just got perhaps the coldest winter on record going on in many parts of the United States.” Flash forward to February 2007 and Limbaugh is still seizing upon every frigid snap as proof that global warming is liberal propaganda. “There is one [article] in the L.A. Times today: ‘Game Over on Global Warming?’ with a question mark after it. It has some interesting statistics in it, but not one story—not one story—will we see about global warming maybe not being real, in the middle of record cold.” He appears to think that if there were true global warming the earth would crisp evenly like a baked apple.

Hence he is unperturbed by the plight of polar bears, because he is as certain as any self-intoxicated know-it-all can be that there is no plight, only contrived melodrama. Most of you innocents in the noncombatant world may not be aware that right-wing ideologues have drafted polar bears as political pawns; they—the ideologues, that is, not the polar bears—understand that these creatures, like penguins, have an adorable, vulnerable appeal to average people, and can arouse more sympathy and calls to action than any sheaf of scientific studies. “That’s how they intend to infuse you with guilt, and to make you feel sympathetic and sorry,” Limbaugh explained on his February 5, 2007, polar-bear broadcast, “so that you will sit around and the next time Hillary Clinton wants to take $40 billion of Exxon profits for global warming you’ll let her do it because you’ll feel guilty over having caused all this!” Therefore Rush and his confederates have been making a full-court effort to debunk photos of polar bears stranded on ice—as if the one photo they debunk invalidates all the other ones out there—and to contend that their number is thriving. This is primarily an optical delusion. A feature story on the official nasa Web site in September 2006 revealed that scientists from nasa and the Canadian Wildlife Service had reported that “the slow reduction in sea ice is forcing Arctic polar bears to fast for longer and longer periods, posing danger to their survival.” Such fasting affects female polar bears’ capacity to reproduce and their offspring’s ability to survive. “As the bears become thinner, they will also have a greater tendency to seek alternative food villages and hunting camps, giving the impression to some that the population is increasing [my italics].” An impression Limbaugh would be happy to fan.

washington—The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won’t have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by the Associated Press.

“Things are happening and happening faster than we expected,” said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the many co-authors of the new report.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. —Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, March 10, 2007.

Limbaugh will shrug off this report as he has shrugged off the others. If he could set his shrug to music, he could become king of the mambo beat. Valiant efforts have been made to correct the mistakes, half-truths, exaggerations, and confusions that Limbaugh coughs up like furballs during his preachings. In 1994 the Environmental Defense Fund issued a rebuttal to The Way Things Ought to Be and See, I Told You So titled “The Way Things Really Are: Debunking Rush Limbaugh on the Environment.” Where Limbaugh claimed that ozone depletion was being hyped by “prophets of doom,” the E.D.F. report stated, “Substantially reduced levels of ozone have been measured over most of the globe.” Where Limbaugh cited a Gallup poll finding that 53 percent of scientists engaged in global-climate research don’t believe that global warming has occurred, the E.D.F. discovered the numbers had been garbled. E.D.F.: “Nowhere in the actual poll results are there figures that resemble those cited by … Limbaugh. Instead, the Gallup poll found that a substantial majority of the scientists polled, 66 percent, believed that human-induced global warming was already occurring.” In 1995, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting—fair—brought out a paperback called The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, wrestling with such oft repeated Rushisms as his screwy notion that even if the polar ice caps did melt there’d be no rise in ocean levels, and his eye-opening discovery that there were more acres of forestland in America in 1993 than when Columbus discovered the New World, in 1492 (wrong). In 1996, Al Franken swung for the fences with his lyrical study Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, having fun with Limbaugh’s fictional fact-checker, Waylon, who’s often baffled himself by the bizarre stuff emanating from Rush’s mouth. (“Al: Okay, let’s jump right in. First of all, back in 1991, Rush claimed that Styrofoam was biodegradable and paper wasn’t. Waylon: Right. I remember that. That is … uh … that’s totally wrong.”) Anyone can make mistakes, and anyone doing a three-hour broadcast five times a week is likely to make lots of them, but Limbaugh’s mistakes all lean in the same direction and leave the impression that they’re intended to obfuscate and make fact-checking as time-consuming, painstaking, and futile as picking shrapnel out of the wall or mopping up after Ann Coulter. Goebbels propagated the theory and practice of the Big Lie, in which constant thumping reiteration wears down rational resistance and fuses heartbeat and drumbeat. Postmodern conservatives prefer to let little lies proliferate and take on a viral life of their own that becomes impossible to arrest.

It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. —Gary Kamiya, Salon, March 13, 2007.

While Limbaugh has been able to maintain his hold on the faithful core, others, less fervent, are peeling off at the periphery, trying not to trip over their own heels as they pedal through a series of fallback positions. (1) Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by liberal social engineers scheming to hamstring growth, ban S.U.V.’s, and traduce property rights (protecting some endangered species’ nesting habitats and preventing the construction of commercial eyesores). (2) O.K., it’s not a hoax, but mankind isn’t at fault; pollution isn’t to blame—it’s the natural result of solar activity or the product of a supercyclical trend (the thesis of a new book by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years). (3) Maybe global warming is partly mankind’s responsibility, but the cure could be worse than the disease, requiring exorbitant regulation that would stifle, even strangle, the animal spirits of free enterprise. (4) Yes, global warming is a fateful challenge; it’s here and it’s real, but (cue the heroic trumpets) mankind has always met adversity with resourceful determination—innovative technologies will come along that will allow America not merely to survive but prevail, while the rest of the world fends for itself. What’s missing from this sequence of fallback positions is the call for any real effort or cost or sacrifice, anything that would require even minor alteration of comfortable routines. Limbaugh will go down in history as a grand obstruction, a massive blockage endowed with the gift of gab. His March 12 Global Warming Update Stack included the news that “Gallup has a poll that says that most Americans are sort of ho-hum about global warming, and are not in any big hurry to do anything about it.” Perhaps that plucky comment could be placed inside Limbaugh’s future diorama near the stuffed body of a polar bear to give visitors a little jot of irony as they shuffle across the grounds.

The Analysis: And I thought I tore up Rush Limbaugh.