"What do you think playground bullies grow up to be?" "Right-wing Republicans."

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich answers a question.

Actually, when I decided I was going to blog this little interview, I planned to feature this line about why our drilling for more oil isn't a good solution to high gas prices:

When you consider that the oil we pump goes into a global oil market, offshore drilling makes no sense. We take the environmental risk, but we’d have to share the negligible price gains with Chinese consumers and every other user around the world.

He's right about that, isn't he? I love the way lefties sometimes get bracingly chauvinistic. Suddenly, it's screw the rest of the world!

Oh, I know... the gains are only negligible anyway. But read the whole interview. Reich is obviously happy that the high gas prices are pushing people into mass transit at long last. If the environment is your primary concern, of course you don't want more domestic drilling, and, what's more, you welcome the high gas prices that make people consume less.

I'm calling Reich a lefty, but I note that he lives in Berkeley (where he's a professor of public policy) and he says "here I am on the right of most arguments."

And this is good. He's asked about whether he dated the college-age Hillary Clinton:

To call it a date is an exaggeration. She and I went out to see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” The only thing I remember is that she wanted what seemed to me to be an extraordinary amount of butter on her popcorn.

Yes, very tasty! Yes! I like it! I like it! Go on!



You know, if a woman indicates she wants extra butter, that means something:

Only an economist could go on a date and study trends in butter consumption. Isn’t that a kind of wonky thing to remember?

Yes, it is. I recall the extra butter costing more.

If the man balks at giving her extra butter on her popcorn, if he seems to calculate the expense, I think she can make some predictions about what any sexual relationship will be like. Later, when Bill took Hillary to the movies — maybe it was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" — I bet Bill was all come on! Double extra butter! And Hillary fell in love. I wish I could find a clip of that scene where Julie Christie pigs out on eggs in front of Warren Beatty and he therefore knows she's quite the woman.

Now, Reich is also very short — 4-foot-10 1/2 — and he notes that he's "much more economically and environmentally sustainable."

I exhale less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I use up less space. I have a little house.

In the future, you will have to buy carbon offsets if you want to be tall or fat.

Anyway, it's at the end of the interview that we get to the quote that I highlighted above. Reich says that because he was short, he was bullied a lot as a kid.

People frequently tell me in interviews that they were bullied as children. But no one ever steps forward and says, “I was the bully.” They don’t want to admit to being a bully.

This provokes the questions-and-answer used as the title of this post.

As for Reich's answer, isn't it more likely that kids who were bullied grow up to be bullies themselves? You're very short and/or weak, but you're smart and you study... then you figure out how to crush your erstwhile tormentors by winning in business or politics. Right?

As my ex-husband used to say — maybe he's still recycling this line — "Life is 'Revenge of the Nerds.'"