Even though I am far away from the New York scene he often writes about, I enjoy James Wolcott - he is one of those writers, like Garrison Kellior, whose writing is vivid and personal and truthful, a tremendously difficult thing to pull off.
Read this one for the New York sense of the Kerik thing. Bernie, We Hardly Knew Ye -- I particularly liked the parting shot at pandering Democrats: "I'm glad the press is having a dance party with this, because God knows the Democrats are frozen at the steering wheel. I just saw a segment on MSNBC . . . pitting a Republican strategist against a Democratic one, and the Democratic spokesman--who goes by the name of Michael Brown--seemed to have washed down his weeny pills with warm Ovaltine. Instead of kicking Kerik and Giuliana between the uprights for three points, Brown fretted that vetting process for cabinet candidates was 'going too far,' and that we were in danger of discouraging people from public service. Oh no, we wouldn't want to discourage philandering, pocket-lining, deadbeat no-show bully-boys like Bernard Kerik from having the opportunity to muck around with our civil liberties in the name of 'national security' and hold bigshot press conferences. I mean, if that sort of thing were to continue happening, people might start mistaking the Democrats for an opposition party and thinking that the press has an adversarial role to play, and we don't want that to happen, it might actually lead to signs of life in that mausoleum we call the nation's capital . . . I don't understand the self-emasculation of so many Democratic strategists, what they're afraid of, why they concede so much in advance. Give them an opening, and they close it like a silk kimono, ever so demure. What are they in politics for, the professional grooming tips? "
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