By Russ Smith
mug1988@aol.com

Let’s, for the sake of argument, not dispute the prevalent view that an overwhelming majority of the Beltway media dislikes Republicans in general (save John McCain—an addiction that can’t be shaken even as the “straight talker” veers to the right on cultural issues—and George W. Bush in particular). Now, suppose you’re a Democrat, of any stripe, who desperately wants to recapture Congress this fall and the presidency in 2008. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, to beg the editors of Democratic Party newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and the directors of news programming at the three major networks to reassign their celebrity journalists to less delicate ports of call for the next three years? 

Times critic A.O. Scott is on book leave currently; if Maureen Dowd started reviewing films, her natural calling, it might make for entertaining reading. Let the Post’s Richard Cohen and E.J Dionne tag-team on coverage of collegiate sports. Paul Krugman, who on Feb. 20 defined the word “mensch” to readers of a New York paper, could switch to essays about economics.

As for the Times’ Bob Herbert, I’m at a loss where to trade him. Maybe he could pull a Joseph Mitchell and just report to work every day without key-punching a syllable. I happen to agree with Herbert’s Feb. 16 view that Harry Whittington is Dick Cheney’s Monica Lewinsky—this ludicrously over-reported story won’t go away—but Herbert seems to forget that in the ’98 elections, the Democrats gained seats in Congress even with Clinton’s impeachment imminent.

The one-note, op-ed columnist is more inept at making a case against Cheney than Jason Giambi is trying to throw a runner out at home plate. Herbert says, among other you-wouldn’t-believe-it-if-you-didn’t-read-it paragraphs, “Mr. Cheney is arrogant, defiant and at times blatantly vulgar. He once told Senator Patrick Leahy to perform a crude act upon himself.” It’s quaint that in 2006 the Times can’t allow the words “go fuck yourself” to appear in print (especially when its editorials are consistently obscene), but let’s give Rev. Herbert the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s never uttered a “barnyard epithet.”

More: “Mr. Cheney’s bumbling conduct at the upscale Armstrong Ranch in South Texas seemed hilarious at first.” It did? You’d think that a Times lifer who disdains vulgarity wouldn’t find the accidental shooting of a 78-year-old man—even pre-heart attack—“hilarious.” Weird, yes; funny, no.

Sarah Vowell, current “guest columnist” at the Times, is a step above Herbert, but not by much. Her Feb. 19 crap is the kind of material that turns off voters who aren’t already firmly in her congregation. Vowell goes to the confessional: “When [Bush] took the presidential oath, I cried. What was I so afraid of? I was weeping because I was terrified that the new president would wreck the economy [wrong, even though Vowell’s editors seems to believe that an unemployment rate under five percent constitutes a depression] and muck up my drinking water. Isn’t that adorable? I lacked the pessimistic imagination to dread that tens of thousands of human beings would be spied on or maimed or tortured or killed or stranded or drowned, thanks to his incompetence.”

Moving over to blogs, Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott may be a Graydon Carter convert on matters political, but, like his boss, in person he’s a very genial and articulate fellow. So his Feb. 19 slam on Mary Matalin, Cheney’s former mouthpiece, was really beneath him. Wolcott, commenting on that day’s “Meet the Press,” said, “Even without the immature [Isn’t that a 7th-grade word?] pouting and pissy expression, Matalin would have been a car wreck in repose: With a bad haircut topping a mistaken facelift and a ghastly floral pin that looked like spray-painted aluminum, she looked liked the Beltway’s Madwoman of Chaillot.”

As an upstanding Christian, I’ll withhold further comment, but perhaps some heathen could make a citizen’s arrest of Wolcott for that sexist hate crime.

Worth a Buck

It’s undeniable that Matt Drudge has slowed down in the past year, whether it’s from tedium, complacency, a taste of the high life or the refusal to invest in the future of his seminal Web site by hiring a few more staffers. The result has been stale posts left untouched for days at a time, even if ongoing events—available at other Internet destinations—have rendered his original headlines obsolete. 

It could be that in a year’s time, Drudge’s long reign of online dominance will be over, unless he can muster the energy to work on more than just fumes and press notices. Maybe Drudge considered his work done when the Times’ Frank Rich (unlike Matt, a victim of declining readership) stopped referring to the self-made millionaire as a “cyber gossip.”

That’s not to say a twice-daily click on “The Drudge Report” is completely fruitless. Last week, for example, a brief article about a Florida gym teacher taking dollar bribes from students to skip his class was a classic: an American story that readers of all ages could relate to, the athletically challenged and jocks alike. According to a Feb. 17 A.P. dispatch, Pensacola resident Terrence Braxton, after it was learned he collected perhaps a few grand in payoffs from September to December of last year, will likely lose his teaching certificate if found guilty, and kids around the country who’ve heard of the scam will curse the parents and authorities who put his career to sleep.

The acceptance of money is pretty sleazy, you have to admit, but as I recall gym class—alternately, P.E.—really sucked, from grades one through 12. The gym teachers, at least when I was an elementary and junior high school student, were inevitably lunkhead ex-jocks who made fun of fat kids, favored the stars, and liked to pretend they were boot camp taskmasters by ordering laps or extra sit-ups for the most mild infraction.

If you want to get all egalitarian about it—and I don’t—gym in public schools was the great equalizer (like wood or metal shop classes), where the guys who couldn’t multiply three digit figures or remember what year the Declaration of Independence was signed had a chance to shine and, at least for 45 minutes, take out their frustrations on junior eggheads and those who weren’t walking on the tightrope of juvenile delinquency.

I had mixed success in phys. ed. Couldn’t stand the coaches, liked hanging out with friends, did well at baseball and football, could never climb a rope very high, was a disaster at gymnastics, crummy at basketball, a whiz on the volleyball court and a nightmare at pull-ups. Closeted teenagers had a particularly rough time of it in the later grades: This was before the word “gay” was official, and so it wasn’t uncommon for certain individuals to get taunted, and thus branded in the hallways, with the words “homo” or “fag” whether it was true or not. Can’t hit a softball? Queer. Dunk 10 baskets in a row? Stud.

At Huntington High School in the early ‘70s, some administrator came up with a remarkably progressive view toward the twice-weekly ritual of phys ed. Starting in 11th Grade, as I remember, gym classes became free-form, which meant students could tailor their own program. Didn’t want to wear a uniform? That’s cool. Interested in archery or bocce instead of traditional sports? A mind-blower and totally acceptable. What was even better, at least to about 100 of us, was that the archery field was near the woods in back of the school, the forest where we hid our hash pipes in tree pockets, making it easy to toke up before engaging in a strenuous match of horseshoes.

I suspect those days are over, just as many of the experiments of that era have bitten the dust—pass-fail grading, English classes devoted to rock lyrics, no science requirements beyond chemistry—but it was compensation for not being born in the computer age.