Word: columnist
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From faculty lounges to garrets to the watering holes of writers across the nation, the unsettling news spread that the script for Bob Dole's best speech ever, his not-a-dry-eye, "White House or home" abdication address, was the work of a Wall Street Journal columnist listed as Mark Helprin. Come again? The Helprin known by starving artists and threadbare assistant professors of English is, after all, an aesthete hatched at the New Yorker and renowned as the writer of eloquent, rarefied novels. And as a tormentor of reporters, who in his early years invented an ever changing...
...Helprin, it turns out, is also a conservative political columnist. He has expostulated for the Wall Street Journal off and on since 1985, in style and tone closer to Rush Limbaugh than George Will. As a contributing editor to the Journal in 1992, he evaluated the man now running as the party's candidate: "Senator Bob Dole, the grand old rhinoceros of the G.O.P., is in his fury and in his wisdom a natural for the presidency, but by the time he assumed it, he would be 73 years of age." Depending on how you feel about rhinoceroses, that could...
...than it looks. On the first show, Republican Congressman John Kasich was so bothered by feedback in his earpiece that he had to keep removing it to answer the questions. A week later, host Tony Snow kept referring to Labor Secretary Robert Reich as "Senator." Snow, a conservative newspaper columnist, is a competent but colorless interviewer, and the show is loaded with superfluous gimmicks (questions from viewers sent over the Internet; clips from old Fox Movietone newsreels). Overall, the program--forced to broadcast from various locations around Washington while a permanent studio is being finished--looks rinky-dink...
...filed fascinating dispatches from the campaign trail, including information on his own body odor; and Jacob Weisberg, probably the most brilliant young fogy to pass through the magazine since Michael Kinsley; and Mickey Kaus, author of a book on welfare reform and a worthy Kinsley successor as the TRB columnist. Margaret Talbot, executive editor since 1995, might be the best contender if it weren't for her boss's Groucho Marx-like problem: Would he give the job to someone who already works there...
...Hush little baby, don't say a word, Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don't sing, Papa's gonna buy you...Oh, I don't know...Europe?" --Bill Gates' lullaby to his new daughter, as imagined by Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield, in USA Today...