I caught this via Jay Nordlinger’s always worthwhile column, “Impromptus.” After John McCain’s hilarious dig at Barbra Streisand on SNL last Saturday night, this is another sign that our comedians get it. It’s Letterman’s take on Barbara Walters’ nauseatingly sycophantic interview with the murderous thug and dictator, Fidel Castro:
TOP TEN SIGNS BARBARA WALTERS IS IN LOVE WITH FIDEL CASTRO
10. Her first question: “How’d you get so dreamy?”
9. Squeals like a schoolgirl every time he tortures a dissident.
8. She’s wearing his varsity dictator jacket.
7. Re-named her newsmagazine “Veinte/Veinte.”
6. Told him, “You have led a violent overthrow of my heart.”
5. Has same look Diane Sawyer had when she and Khomeini were dating.
4. Breakfast, lunch and dinner: pulled pork.
3. New sign-off line on “The View”: “Socialism or death”.
2. When asking him about Camp X-Ray, she accidentally called it “Guantana-marry me.”
1. The long, mangy beard hairs on her blouse
Cheered me up, anyway.
ANTI-WAR BIGOTRY WATCH: “What is ‘self-evidently bizarre,’ however, is that Sullivan seems to be publicly losing his mind. It happens to a lot of people with AIDS. Dementia sets in, eventually, and, no matter how many drug cocktails they take, in the end virtually all succumb to mania and mental deterioration.” – gay Buchananite polemicist Justin Raimondo, Anti-War.com, setting a new level of discourse for the anti-war movement.
KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “While hired guns do not flourish at Harvard or the University of Chicago, however, in Washington they roam in packs.
Portrait of a hired gun: He or she is usually a mediocre economist — someone whose work, if it didn’t have an ideological edge, might have been published but wouldn’t have had many readers. He has, however, found a receptive audience for work that does have an ideological edge. In particular, he has learned that pretty good jobs in think tanks, or on the staffs of magazines with a distinct political agenda, are available for people who know enough economics to produce plausible-sounding arguments on behalf of the party line. Ask him whether he is a political hack and he will deny it; he probably does not admit it to himself. But somehow everything he says or writes serves the interests of his backers.
Most of these hired guns work on behalf of right-wing causes: it’s a funny thing, but organizations that promote the interests of rich people seem to be better financed than those that don’t. Still, the left has enough resources to front a quorum of its own hacks. And anyway, love of money is only the root of some evil. Love of the limelight, love of the feeling of being part of a Movement, even love of the idea of oneself as a bold rebel against the Evil Empire can be equally corrupting of one’s intellectual integrity.
How can you tell the hacks from the serious analysts? One answer is to do a little homework. Hack jobs often involve surprisingly raw, transparent misrepresentations of fact: in these days of search engines and online databases you don’t need a staff of research assistants to catch ’em with their hands in the cookie jar. But there is another telltale clue: if a person, or especially an organization, always sings the same tune, watch out.” – Paul Krugman, two years ago.
The Dish 