Who're You Callin' A Weathervane?

The paper didn’t come this morning, so I fell back on something I rarely read: the New York Times Sunday Book Review. It turns out to be rich in well-crafted put-downs. Here is Michael Lewis on Colin Powell:

…like a good soldier, [he] followed his orders. Only he wasn’t a soldier. He was a wily old political hand. I don’t doubt that Powell acted as a brake rather than an accelerator [in the runup to The War—ed.]. But he has preserved this kind of deniability in almost every aspect of his public life. He seems never to have accepted a promotion without making the promoter beg him to take it, and he seems never to have gone along with a plan without first warning that it might not work.

And here is Jacob Heilbrunn on Ann Coulter

…she is really a kind of conservative life coach, a personal shopper for her clients, one who identifies and digests the latest political trends before serving them up in even more inflammatory language. Not one of Coulter’s arguments is original to her; each is cribbed from the conservative press, which is why searching for specific passages she has plagiarized … is a superfluous exercise. Even a cursory look at her books shows that she essentially functions as a kind of right-wing weathervane.

Actually, that last is probably more of a put-down of Coulter’s biographers (i.e., for missing the point) than of Coulter herself.

Oddly enough, another piece, largely free of put-down, involves two old past masters of the art—Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Gore Vidal. Hitchens gets in a few snipes, but for the most part he shows a (surprising?) willingness to let an old man die in peace.

[Fn: Hey, what's your beef with the Book Review? Honestly, nothing, and in fact I am a big fan of Sam Tannenbaum {oops, Tannenhaus; thanks, Bob}. But there aren't enough hours in the day. And fn to fn: evidently I am not alone in my indifference to the review. Checking my correction, I came up with this.]