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.
