Login HereMatt Bai has a very nice piece on the late great Steve Gilliard
The Buffalo Beast has up their list of the 50 Most Loathsome People In America for 2007. Sample:
14. Glenn Beck Crimes: If Fox News isn't quite asinine enough for you, just click on over to Headline News, where the CNN brand is eagerly defiling its vestigial credibility by giving an hour a day to the dumbest dumbfuck in dumbfuckistan, Glenn Beck. A white-knuckle, dry drunk, closet case man-child with apparent xenophobia issues and a penchant for end-times theology, Mormon convert Beck is palpably horny for the apocalypse, passive-aggressively accusing even the world's most benign Muslims of plotting America's destruction and likening withdrawal from Iraq to slavery. Beck's combination of faux everyman persona and deliberate misinformation -- The hottest year on record was 1934 (actually 2005), tax cuts increase revenue (patently false Reaganomic mysticism), Antarctica is cooling, Scooter Libby went to jail -- seems increasingly insane, as his whole persona seems to be a frantic pantomime of how he thinks an even-keeled, "smart" bigot would act. Thinks Al gore is "like Hitler." May actually be in love with the president of Iran.
Exhibit A: "I don't know if the Muslim community will ever step to the plate like the Japanese-American community did during World War II. You know, it was absolutely disgraceful how we rounded innocent people up then and, sadly, history has a way of repeating itself no matter how grotesque that history might be. The Muslim community can prevent this if they act now."
Sentence: Anchored to the Florida shore, Beck is forcibly compelled to vigorously deny the gradual rise of water levels around him as boats full of gay, Marxist Muslim illegal immigrants arrive and disembark nearby. Eventually, after two decades, Beck drowns.
Then there is Gary Willis on why Mitt Romney is no JFK. Granted, he only scratches the surface...
Finally, back when we were looking for a college for the lovely and talented Casey we only knew about her future school for one reason. In Sports Illustrated, Alexander Wolff writes about the school's fifteen minutes of fame.
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Most sports fans over 40 can tell you where they were when Chaminade beat Virginia (condo at Mammoth, sore, stoned and bemulleted). That and ‘Nova 85 were the signal events in what became college hoops’ great decade.
Thanks, this is all very helpful, as I didn’t get any books for Christmas this year. I did get a VISA gift card, however, which will soon be used to buy some books from a local non-chain vendor the next time I find myself in Berkeley or SF with some spare time.
“Starchier than a peep booth wastebasket, Gregory’s occasional faux-outraged exchanges with various White House press secretaries have established his reputation as a man unafraid to confront the big scandals — once they’ve been well mainstreamed by better reporters.”
How good is that? Great writing.
And yes, both Chaminade and Villanova stand out. For me, Villanova was a night to remember. I had a pennant my father hung on his wall when he attended Villanova in the 50’s. Took it with me to the campus after the game where a few thousand students had gathered to party. A young woman, perched atop the shoulders of a young man, saw me holding the pennant up high and figured she could hold it higher. She ripped it in half. I skulked off and set a police car on fire.
Catholics were familiar enough to Americans—there was no weirdo factor.
Gee, that’s nice. I guess I had the whole Klan/Know Nothing/Bob Jones thing completely wrong, then.
The Gilliard piece is wonderful. Kos linked to it, and I read it a little while ago. Sad he had to go so soon. Perhaps a warning to others to get off the computer and stay active as well.
The Chaminade story is just a classic. The bits about the coach are the best part. How does one pronounce “Chaminade?”
I know these lists are meant to start arguments, but, seriously, how do you have a list of the 50 Most Loathsome People in America of 2007 and not even mention Joe Lieberman once?
a slightly different take on the Bai article over on the other side of the wall.
…how do you have a list of the 50 Most Loathsome People in America of 2007 and not even mention Joe Lieberman once?
Lieberman was #42 on the 2006 list (scroll to the bottom of the article to get links to previous years’ lists) so maybe they thought he wasn’t worth mentioning again.
They were wrong.
Yeah, pick on the fat man even after death. Did you read the article? He died of an infection of his heart valves. Not a heart attack. Not an obesity related disease. It began with a cough–probably picked up when he did get off the computer and go out……..
The piece on Gilliard was nice. Too bad that NetSlaves is no longer around; it would have been nice to go back and look for some of his earlier work rather than seeing one of those cybersquatter placeholders.
No love for the Top 50 list, though. The usual garbage bin of easy targets and personal grudges that I’ve come to expect from alternative weeklies. Some of this snark has been around the block so many times that it’s worn a rut in the sidewalk. And, as captphealy noted, they manage to miss some of the most obvious targets no matter how long they are.