Crimmins has been doing this for so long, has been so prescient, insightful and dead-on-target, he makes Theodore White’s Making-of-a-President series look like hack National Enquirer tripe.
And this year, there’s no change in that status, with On the national affront: An inescapable year reaches its inevitable conclusion.
“Could 2007 somehow have been avoided? Where does one begin to recap 12 months of such willful self-parody? Isn’t it insulting to explain why, say, waterboarding is wrong, especially when one of the few people who needs this clarified is the new attorney general of the United States?
Corporate and political hoodlums spent the year doing three things: planning crimes, committing crimes, and covering up crimes. If this is news to you, no summary will bring you up to speed. So here are just some highlights of 2007, because it would be cruel and indecent to make you remember it all.”
Crimmins mows down the list, from unreal real estate, to Saddam Hussein (“We still had manners”), to the cowering Congress and, of course, our pop culture pap that passes in so many outlets as hard news (“On February 8, the news-o-tainment divisions caught a break when hillbilly superwidow Anna Nicole Smith died of a drug overdose.”), and, of course the ever-growing violence in our ever-growing police state (“While American children spent the year playing Russian roulette with Chinese toys, teens and alleged adults dabbled with even deadlier devices.”)
Senator Larry Craig and the Bush Regime don’t escape unscathed, as well as the Presidential Marathon, err , Campaign, complete with the numbing addition of the “Ewe tube”
“These confabs were sometimes said to be revolutionary because they employed the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube to collect questions from regular Americans, thus cutting out the mainstream media. Except for one thing: the mainstream media vetted the questions. So what we got were either inane stunt queries, included to underscore the Earth-shaking newness of this approach, or the same stupid questions the hacks could have asked more succinctly than some narcissist with a Web cam hamming it up on technology that produced video about two notches below Neil Armstrong’s viral “One Small Step” work in 1969.”
So, ring out and shed your old, scaly 2007 skin with Barry Crimmin’s Year-In-Review!
Read: On the national affront: An inescapable year reaches its inevitable conclusion
Other Barry Crimmins on The Garlic
Bonus Barry Links
Picking up on a Crimmins post, Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott’s “Huckabee in the Bonnet”
Wolcott, again, quoting from Crimmin’s hilarious “review” of Wolf Blitzer and his Situation Room program in his The Year of Tragical Thinking
