Slate’s ‘Chatterbox” columnist Timothy Noah is so deeply in the tank for Barack Obama that we hope he doesn’t drown (we love Tim personally, just not politically).
Back in August, for example, Noah saw racist overtones in Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Chozick’s tongue-in-cheek feature story wondering whether Americans, the vast majority of whom are overweight, would be willing to vote for a “skinny” candidate such as Barack Obama. Scolding Chozick and her editors for insensitivity to Obama’s ethnicity, Noah wrote: “The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama’s physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that’s most on their minds.”
Yet, as Noah’s fellow blogger for Slate Mickey Kaus, points out, Noah’s Obamamania definitely does not extend to Obama’s erstwhile pal the unrepentant Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers. Kaus has unearthed Noah’s scathing seven-year-old review for Slate of Ayers’s memoir, “Fugitive Days.” In an essay titled “Radical Chic Revisited,” Noah wrote:
“Chatterbox isn’t sure he’s ever read a memoir quite so self-indulgent and morally clueless as Fugitive Days….
“Ayers periodically expresses mild regret for his crimes, in tones reminiscent of a middle-aged insurance executive who wishes he hadn’t gotten drunk quite so often at his college fraternity. ‘We took ourselves so seriously–OK, a little too seriously, we were too earnest by half and way too insistent,’ he writes at one point. ‘[F]rom the edges, we were entirely inflexible, maybe even a bit goofy.’”
Kaus observes: “[Noah] describes Ayers as “self indulgent and morally clueless” and generally treats the ex-Weatherman as a pathetic joke. … Is Noah really 100% comfortable with a Democratic candidate who didn’t?”