Unsympathetic ≠ Antichrist
More than anyone else . . . Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country's moral and political standing. - Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, July 9, 2007 (my emphasis)Oh, come on! Maybe if you have a very short memory. I hate to use the words "Cheney" and "piling on" in the same sentence, but it's hard not to at times. Cathartic though it may be to rail and vent, all this piling on and hyperbole does cheapen and polarize the political dialogue.
Unprecedented disgrace to our moral standing?! Among other things, people in this country used to be able to own other people. Ending that disgrace required, among other things, a gruesome war, many individual days of which make the U.S. loss of life during the five-year folly in Iraq look like a day at the park.
Even trivial bits of Hertzberg's screed indicate some lack of care. There was a time when an erroneous reference to "[t]hat unfortunate day in the duck blind." would never have reached print in a magazine once famed for its scrupulous fact checking. There was a time, I have to believe, when Mr. Shawn's pencil would have gently effaced pointless, incorrect references like "a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d'etat." Perhaps his biggest objection would have been to the illogical mixed metaphor. Blows are not slow.
posted at 7:54 PM
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