Gail Collins, "The Wages of Rages," New York Times, 20 February 2010.Politicians often get into trouble when they’re trying to sound more furious than they feel. And [Minnesota Governor Tim] Pawlenty told the conservatives they should try to be more like ... Tiger Woods’s wife.
“We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country,” he urged.
The overall strangeness of this thought aside, consider the timing. An angry man had just smashed his airplane into an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex., killing one federal employee, injuring others and breaking quite a few windows. Does this seem like the very best time to be encouraging people to assault government property? Pawlenty’s defenders will undoubtedly say that he did not want his listeners to literally grab a golf club and hit something. But it is my experience that many Americans do not totally understand the concept of a metaphor. . . .
See also ThinkProgress
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