The American Spectator

Enemy of the Week

To Your Stealth!

By Enemy Central on 5.18.07 @ 12:08AM

It hasn't been a good week for Ron Paul. Who? As Washington Post fact-checker Howard Kurtz noted, before the other night Paul was "a guy no one had ever heard of." Evidently, his name has never appeared on any ballot, though he has served in Congress since 1997. Now his cover is blown. Next thing you know George McGovern will want to join his ticket. Virginia Plame has sent a sympathy card. Already given his fond reference to the Vatican last Tuesday, some assume he must be Pope Ron Paul. But nothing is likely to immortalize him more than this wire from our veteran London agent, Col. Donald Parnell, who tap-tapped: "I nominate my former Congressman and future Huffington Post contributor Ron Paul as this week's EOW for joining the Blame America First crowd in regards to 9-11."

These days someone like Paul can only feel safe within the confines of ABC News, where anchor Charlie Gibson is proudly refusing to provide any coverage of Republican presidential debates. That's the way it is, not that you'd know it. Gibson's censoring extended to the manner of his news show's coverage of the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell. Whereas the NBC and CBS evening news led with it, Charlie refused to "venerate" this "controversial figure." So next time Hitler dies, Charlie will pay him no mind. It's not so much a matter of news judgment, he told the aforementioned Kurtz, as his now being "more willing to express my gut."

He's been reading too much Christopher Hitchens, who at least has an excuse: he's the prototype of John McCain's drunken sailor. The wretched excess that comes out of his ravaged innards defies language. In his new book, Hitchens avers that "religions poisons everything." One can only infer that in his experience religion is synonymous with alcohol and so when he upchucks words to paper he's not in control of his faculties. That is our religious interpretation of his depraved attack on the late Falwell even before the deceased's body -- what Hitchens in Slate termed "the carcass of Jerry Falwell" -- had been moved to a funeral home.

Incidentally, Slate was so proud of its house drunk that it played up Hitchens's dehumanizing reference to Falwell as its "LINE of the DAY." That should win them a Pulitzer.

Fortunately we have someone nicer to fall back on, which in this case may actually be true, namely the struggling Ms. Katie Couric, whose dismal ratings, try as everyone might, just refuse to budge. Naturally, the white male suits who hired her for Roger Clemens numbers surmise the fault lies with white males who don't wear suits. As one of them put it, "There is a percentage of people out there that probably prefers not to get their news from a woman." Yeah, that's why they watch Charlie Gibson so as not to get any news at all. Anyway, studies show that wives are more likely to bring husbands their morning paper than vice versa, and that the husbands like it that way. In short, they do prefer to get their news from a woman.

And we prefer to deliver our good news directly to our weekly prizewinners. This week, who else: the editor of Slate, whose name doesn't matter, but who in any event failed to learn at the foot of Charlie Gibson and instead chose to venerate a false idol. Good. We've expressed our gut. Now it's your turn.

Send your Enemy of the Week nominations to Enemy Central c/o editor@spectator.org.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
John McCain, Business, Religion