The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Dominos Specialty Chicken
Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control
“Domino’s Rolls Out a New Pizza Crust Made Out of Chicken”–headline, Chicago Sun-Times website, April 16
Out on a Limb
“In the end, testing people on their beard preferences can probably tell you about one thing–what that group of people, and others like them, think about facial hair.”–Joseph Stromberg, Vox .com, April 17
It’s Always in the Last Place You Look
“Biology Pupils Find Horse in Kebab Meat Test”–headline, (Germany’s) TheLocal .de, April 16
You’ve Been Warrened
In discussions of the 2016 presidential race, Democrat Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, occasionally gets mentioned as a possible alternative in case Hillary Clinton doesn’t work out again. Warren has a new memoir out, which is sure to raise questions as to whether she’s ready for prime time. As the Puffington Host notes, she certainly wasn’t five years ago:
Warren has gotten an awful lot of mileage out of her popular appearances on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” But it was something of a revolting experience the first time she prepared to sit across from the sometimes caustic comedian.
She had such a bad case of nerves before the 2009 broadcast that Warren threw up. Twice.
“I was miserable. I had stage fright–gut-wrenching, stomach-turning, bile-filled stage fright. And I was stuck in a gloomy little bathroom, about to go on The Daily Show,” the Massachusetts Democrat recalls in her new book, A Fighting Chance, due out next week.
“I was having serious doubts about going through with this. I had talked to reporters and been interviewed plenty of times, but this was different. At any second, the whole interview could turn into a giant joke — and what if the joke turned on the work I was trying to do?”
“For the zillionth time, I asked myself why on God’s green earth I had agreed to sit down with Jon Stewart,” Warren writes.
The Boston Globe reports that a 2012 interview didn’t go well either:
The story began at McKay’s, a diner in Quincy, where Warren sat for an interview of around 20 minutes with Daily Beast reporter Samuel Jacobs. Her campaign spokesman, Kyle Sullivan, sat by and recorded the interview.
The reporter “really seemed engaged,” she writes. “Kyle said he thought it was a good interview. Me too.”
And then, a week and a half later, she read the article.
The headline was “Warren Takes Credit for Occupy Wall Street,” and it quoted Warren saying that she “created much of the intellectual foundation” for the nascent movement.
Warren could not believe she had said such a thing. She quickly contacted Sullivan, to review their recording of the interview. He already had. Indeed, the quote was correct.
“I was deeply embarrassed,” Warren writes. “My words sounded so puffy and self-important, and they made it seem as if I were trying to take credit for a protest I wasn’t even part of. I wondered if some alien had invaded my body and said something stupid while the real me was visiting a desert island.”
“I wondered if politics turned everyone into an idiot–or was it just me?” she added. “I wanted to cover my head with a blanket and never come out.” …
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
