As of this writing, the population of the U.S., according to
numbers accepted by most everyone except Al Franken and his crack
team, is 305,518,893. To think that one of that number might grow
up to win our annual prize. And like the U.S. at its best and
most porous, we welcome outsiders too, or outliers in the current
parlance (not to be confused with out and out liars — but enough
of this Clinton bashing. There won’t be any more need to revive
that impulse, right Messrs. Emanuel and Axelrod?).
One fern’er crossed our reading path just the other moment. She
is the Britty rock diva, Lily Allen, of whom it is written in the
London Speccie, “There are many Spectator
readers who will sympathise with the sentiment if not the title
of her song ‘F*** You,’ about George W. Bush (‘We hate what you
do, and we hate your whole crew, so please don’t stay in
touch’).” So whom will the haters finger once he’s gone? Once a
hater, always a lefty. And vice-versa, backwards and forwards,
over and out.
It’s a special breed of annual enemy who insists on telling us
whom we should regard as the enemy. How the last eight years must
have flown by for them as they were having so much fun. A few
successor possibilities have emerged: Rick Warren, the Mormon
Church, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin in her new role as
grandmother, Caroline Kennedy… Oops, what’s she doing there?
You know how it is, you know — with so few right-of-center
targets left, the left is left having to devour its own. Survival
of the unfittest, you know.
What a disappointment: Lady Caroline had everything going for
her, niceness, politeness, pleasantness, one might even say
wholesomeness. Despite the tragic loss of her parents and
brother, she kept her head up and never played the victim. She
remains married to her only husband, their children having been
raised without any hint of scandal. Single-handedly she deprived
Hillary Clinton of the U.S. presidency. Even more conservatively,
she decided to join the U.S. Senate in the time-honored, pre-17th
Amendment manner. So naturally left and right have coalesced to
denounce her as elitist, dynastic, and unmeritocratic. Leading
the way was that big bozo Leon Wieseltier, a coalition in his own
mind, who even as he
slapped at Mrs. Schlossberg made sure his readers knew that
he too had attended Harvard. And that was before Mrs. Schlossberg
consented to sit down to an
interview with two all-male hyenas from the New York
Times. The rest is herstory. The um-you-knowing
notwithstanding, though, it contained one rhetorical gem, as when
she expanded the target audience of the Special Olympics founded
by her aunt Eunice Shriver to include those diagnosed as
“intellectually disabled.” All the money Mrs. Schlossberg has
raised for Joel Klein and New York City’s schools won’t begin to
remedy that malady, though it might cover the speech therapy that
next time around will allow Mrs. Schlossberg to resound like
Daniel Webster.
Which leaves us with three incorrigibles. None requires speech
therapy. Hot Rod Blagojevich would beg to differ, though his
problem could easily be handled if someone were to wash his mouth
out with soap and water. You might recall former Senator John
Edwards. We’d rather not go there, for that would have us hiding
in a Beverly Hills hotel basement, quaking in fear that a tabloid
reporter and photographer might discover our illicit whereabouts.
Democratic profiles in courage aren’t what they used to be,
that’s for sure. And even with Slate editor Jacob
Weisberg acting the part of William Gladstone, Ms. Ashley Dupre’s
recent client is not likely to return to the righteous path.
That’s because the lout thinks he was acting morally all along
when he destroyed the careers of some of Wall Street’s finest.
And now Slate has given him a column in which he takes
“nuanced”
positions on the financial crisis he helped set in motion.
Clearly he’s learned nothing from his mistakes. When asked by an
ABC reporter how he liked life as a columnist, he replied, “It
sucks.” With a tin ear like that, how can Eliot Spitzer not be
runaway Enemy of the Year?
