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Robert Novak, Columnist, Dies at 78
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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. |
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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... |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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