Monthly Archives: October 2003

The credibility of The New York Post takes another downward plunge. Read all about it here.

Here's the latest.

Michael Kinsley on where our president gets his news.

I cribbed this from Atrios, who is one of the leading left-wing bloggers. It's a paragraph from an honest-to-God news item…

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

Wouldn't it be embarrassing to be the guy who got fired for leaking that one?

Clark J. Holloway has some great web pages about comic strips. Here's a terrific history of Bringing Up Father (aka "Maggie and Jiggs"). And here's another one devoted to Alley Oop.

Someone just sent me a transcript of the 1978 Playboy magazine interview with David Frost. This was conducted just after Frost had conducted his historic interviews of Richard M. Nixon. To Playboy, he told the following anecdote which I've always thought was indicative of something quite amazing (I'm not sure what) about our thirty-seventh president…

Small talk, of course, is never easy with Nixon. For instance, one day, Nixon — wanting to be one of the boys — turned to me as we strolled in to start taping and said, "Did you do any fornicating this weekend?" And I just could not believe he'd said that. Quite apart from the fact that lovers use the word fornicating about as regularly as newsmen say, "Well, we've managed to trivialize matters again tonight, Henry." I mean, I just couldn't believe it. One almost had to warm to the sheer clumsiness of it all. It really did fascinate me that Nixon could have gotten through 30 years of politics, of attending countless fund raisers and such, and still be so bad at small talk.

One thing that's interesting about it is that as the transcripts of the infamous White House tapes show, Nixon was not at all reticent about using the more common "f" word around his buddies and underlings. Leaving aside the question of why he would even inquire about David Frost's sexual exploits, you have to wonder why the choice of the word, "fornicating?" Was it because Frost was British? Did he talk to Margaret Thatcher that way?

I haven't mentioned Spinsanity lately so here's a mention of the most rational political site on the web. The folks there debunk and fact-check articles and speeches by prominent politicos and commentators from all corners of the political spectrum. They just posted a bunch of articles that catch Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly and William Safire distorting the truth, as well as various people who've recently attacked Wesley Clark and John Ashcroft with bogus data. I wish there were more websites that could recognize bullshit from other than their political opponents.

Cartoonist Fred Hembeck posts a fond remembrance of the work of the late Pete Morisi.

Here's a piece about Triumph the Insult Comic Dog from the Conan O'Brien show. But really, it's about Robert Smigel who works the puppet and does a lot of other funny things.

Buzz Dixon is a fine writer and one of my favorite people, even though he and I rarely mark our ballots the same way. He writes the following about the matter of Mr. Limbaugh and his pill-popping…

There's actually a 4th position out there, but one that isn't getting a lot of airplay/bloggage. This is not because this POV is being deliberately blocked so much as the people holding it have a wait-and-see attitude. These are the supporters of Rush Limbaugh who are very troubled by the hypocrisy of his words vs. his deeds re his drug use. We're waiting to see what he has to say when he gets out of treatment. Anything less that an open admission he was a hypocrite when he advocated strict punishment of drug abusers is not going to fly with this group. Acknowledgement of hypocrisy would have to be followed by sincere steps to insure his listeners it will not happen again.

He is, roughly speaking, in the same place Jimmy Swaggart was when he was caught peeking at prostitutes' privates a decade or so ago. It is possible for him to regain much (but not all) of the lost trust through contrition and genuine reform of his habits. However, if he fails that trust again as Swaggart did then he will lose all mainstream credibility and have only hard core easy-to-dismiss followers. I don't want that to happen. I want the man to rebuild as much of his credibility as he can, but if he is not honest enough with his audience to acknowledge he was a hypocrite then he will lose all credibility with most of them.

You may be right, Buzz, but I'm doubtful. I haven't listened to Rush in years but when I did, it struck me that his main appeal involved reassuring conservative listeners that the world was just the way they wanted to believe it was. When the news was bad for Democrats, he spun it so it was worse. When the news was bad for Republicans, he spun it so it was bad for Democrats. When a caller veered close to facts that called his interpretation into question, he cut them off and gave himself the last word to explain why they were not only wrong but why anyone who suggested whatever the caller was trying to say was ignorant and could be ignored. Rush is a smart guy and at times, tremendously entertaining. But I think his act is all about playing to an audience that likes to see things through the filter he provides and they'll be eager to believe whatever he has to say.

My guess is he'll emerge from rehab proclaiming not only that he's clean but that that proves that anyone with a drug dependency can lick it in thirty days if they really want to accept personal responsibility. He'll portray his problem as medicinal and argue that since he didn't start taking the drugs for recreational use, it's completely different from the addictions that crack whores and other users bring on themselves. He'll hint that he was "set up" for the bust, congratulate himself on licking his problem, and thereafter urge that people show compassion for those who have his particular, non-intentional kind of addiction. Since he's white and wealthy and powerful, he will pay a token fine and receive some sort of suspended sentence or probation…or less. And the vast majority of his listeners will buy every word of it and admire him all the more for his courageous stance.

You could be right. But if you're waiting for the guy to say, "I've been a hypocrite," I think you'll be waiting for a long time.

Most of the commentaries I've seen about Rush Limbaugh and his druggie dilemma struck me as either…

• Anti-Rush People doing a merry dance, hauling out his old anti-drug quotes and doing Rush-like speeches about his hypocrisy.
• Anti-Rush People wringing their hands, saying (and perhaps even meaning) that they get no joy from the revelations and saying (and perhaps even meaning) that he shouldn't be punished the way he has advocated punishing others. Or…
• Pro-Rush People just trying to spin the facts to save their boy.

I think I'm with the subset of the second group…the ones who really mean it. And the most interesting comments I've read so far on the whole situation are these by Bill Maher. Who knows a thing or two about drug use.

There's a lot of neat stuff amidst the pop-up ads at IGN Filmforce. I enjoyed reading this just-posted interview with Penn Jillette. And while I was over there, I also enjoyed this older interview with Stephen Colbert of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Both were conducted by Ken Plume, who is a darn good interrogator of interesting people.

Full details are now available on The Complete Peanuts, the reprint series we told you about here. If you go to this message board page, you can read all about this forthcoming series and begin computing how much it's going to set you back. This is a terrific project, especially because so many of the early Peanuts strips have never been reprinted in any form. I personally think Charles Schulz hit his stride in the mid-sixties but from what I've seen of the first 10-15 years, we're in for a real treat. It was never anything less than a great strip, not even when Schulz was fiddling with his characters, randomly changing their ages and attitudes and finding his unique voice. Clear a bookshelf now.

In the National Post, Jeet Heer offers an overview of the careers of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

There are a couple of things in it that seem to me like errors. Stan Lee's real name is Stanley Lieber, not Leiber. (The article also misspells the name of Jordan Raphael, whose book is being reviewed in the process.) I'd take issue with the claim that Kirby changed his name because he was "slightly ashamed of his immigrant roots" or that he was ever reticent to talk about his war experiences. Most of Jack's friends would say that he never concealed his heritage and that you couldn't shut him up with the World War II stories. Joe Simon was not his "childhood chum." They met less than two years before doing Captain America, who was created before Stan Lee began working at Timely Comics, not after as is implied.

But otherwise, the article makes some good points and gives a good assessment of the importance of the two men. I think the analogy of Lee and Kirby as the "Lennon and McCartney of comics" only goes so far but fortunately, Heer doesn't take it too far. Take a look.