Robert Novak, Columnist, Dies at 78
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/bu...a/19novak.html

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Wow...any particular reason?

ETA: I'm aware of the Plame thing and his reputation...it just seems a bit harsh to celebrate that the guy died of brain cancer.

Stay classy.

Too late, it would seem.

Two of my Facebook friends have put up a status similar to aephi alum's thoughts; one is "My day is noticably brighter, Novak has died." The other is "Brain cancer evidentally doesn't work fast enough" with a link to the NY Times story.

Kind of shocking...

To me, comments like that say much more about the speaker than about the person they're talking about.

Sheesh! Most of my friends who deigned to comment on it (we're not a political crowd, no one's even talking about ObamaCare!) said something about his being the Prince of Darkness. But that's really about it.

I have a lot of friends who think they know more than they actually do about politics...mostly high school friends (and among those, mostly ones who did not attend college). My college and law school friends seem to be a bit more mature on issues (for the most part).

That's how it often is, huh? I think most of my core group of friends is pretty conservative (a bunch of us became friends when we started doing charity work for servicemembers), but we have enough to talk about where politics rarely gets in the way. None of us have jobs that belie our political leanings, either.

My office? Well, that's another story.

My favorite words/phrases from that story:

"pugnacious"

"cub reporter"

"notebook-and-shoe-leather newspaperman"

What are they going to say when people from the internet era start dying? "He began in the days of only 3 bytes of RAM"? It just doesn't have the same ooomph to it.

OK that was funny.

I once joked about a "dance on your grave" tour featuring mainly people responsible for Post-Modern literary theory, but it seems much harder to be that dismissive of people when you stop and think of them as human beings.

It would be hard for me to link to an obituary here with that kind of opening post, I think. Maybe I need to check to make sure I haven't done it.

Look. Death is almost never an occasion for celebration. (I say "almost never" because the execution of a serial killer or rapist could be considered cause for celebration. But as Novak was neither, that is irrelevant.)

I disagree with his politics, and then there was the whole Valerie Plame thing. But that by itself is not a valid reason not to respect someone.

I lost all respect for the man in 2002. At the time, he appeared on Crossfire as one of two "on the right" pundits opposite two "on the left" pundits. Then, as now, we were in a recession. There was a segment called (I believe) "Fireback", where they would answer viewers' letters and email. A viewer wrote in, in obvious distress, to give his own personal perspective on the economy. He had been laid off, his wife was unemployed, and they were struggling to support themselves and their children on unemployment checks that were small to begin with and would disappear entirely in a few weeks.

All Novak could say was: "Get a job."

We were in a recession. Jobs were not exactly easy to come by. I had been abruptly laid off a couple of months earlier, and I could not find a job for love or money, even with my master's degree from a top university. It was all but impossible to find so much as a part-time, minimum-wage job, let alone a job that paid enough to live on.

I wrote in asking him directly how he'd feel if he lost his job. What if he were in the other man's shoes and had to find a job, any job, to support his family - and couldn't even get a job flipping burgers at Mickey D's? Of course, my letter went unanswered.

The man had no perspective on the harsh realities of everyday life.

Nonetheless, I wish his family comfort in their time of sorrow.

What he said may have been insensitive. He may have lacked perspective, in your opinion. You may think the guy is a jerk.

But "good riddance," and expressing some sort of relief at his death (from a terrible illness) is a pretty extreme sentiment about someone who died.

ETA: I think I was just kind of surprised by your sentiments because I find you one of the more logical/reasonable people on the board.

If I had to bet, I'd wager there's a good chance he never even saw your letter.

And you don't think it sounds a tad insincere to say that after starting this thread with "good riddance to bad rubbish"?