Dispatches from the Adverbially-Based Community

So I fly into the Philadelphia area for a quick family visit; I log on to the hotel Wi-Fi, and I connect to the Vast Pajamas Empire, where I see that Steve Green has linked to an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer with the following portentous verbiage regarding Hillary Clinton:

As far as realistic politics are concerned, she either learned them from or taught them to a master, her husband. She would have no problem in terms of name recognition. And her own health-care debacle taught her not to push politically sluggardly Americans too far.

As Steve responds:

Hey, Democrats, here’s a little tip for winning back the middle of the country: Keep calling us “politically sluggardly Americans.”

We seriously dig that. Seriously.

Indeed. Though considering the newspaper on whose Website it appears, such literary good cheer is on par with the other warm, inviting spirit of Philadelphia I love to come back to. It hits you right off the plane, beginning with Philadelphia’s airport, with its combination of brutalist concrete and tiled walls, which resembles nothing so much as Le Corbusier’s ideal version of les toilettes pour hommes.

Though once you get beyond the newspapers and the airport, it’s all downhill from there, and there’s much about the city, its people, and its surrounding areas to love when returning. Or as Apu would say on the Simpsons, come back again, if you survive.

And to be fair, such language is a minor step up from 2008, when “liberals” such as Nora Ephron was calling Pennsylvania’s Democrats racist because they supported Hillary.

In the Wall Street Journal, Emmett Tyrrell writes liberalism’s obituary.  Of course, one can find similar wakes for every political movement in the last decade. But the constant smugness and attacks — overwhelmingly racialist since 2008 — on any and everyone to the right of whoever is currently endorsed by the New York Times op-ed page haven’t exactly done wonders for that politically sluggardly octogenarian ideology’s health.

Adverbially speaking, of course.