Novak is such a classic weenie boy that Edward McClelland even titles his Salon review of Novak's memoir "Bob Novak is not one of the popular kids."
McClelland quotes a passage from Timothy Crouses The Boys on the Bus about Novak's inability to fit in with other reporters:
"Novak was standing off to himself. He was short and squat, with swarthy skin, dark gray hair, a slightly rumpled suit, and an apparently permanent scowl ... Some of the other reporters pointed him out and whispered about him almost as if he were a cop come to shush up a good party.
"'There's a real tight coil of bitterness in the guy,' said a magazine writer. 'So much of what he writes and talks about in private tends to reinforce one impression: he's against anything fashionable, anything slick -- and liberalism is slick in the circles he travels in. Maybe that's why he's down on it.'"
Novak wanted to be one of the "popular" guys. He seems to remember every dinner party he wasn't asked to over the last fifty years. But like George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Doug Feith, and a bunch of other right-wingers, he just couldn't bring himself to fit in.
McClelland stretches out the list of envious and unconventional conservative types a little further.
If that were true, it would place Novak in the same company as nerdy right-wing intellectuals like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Samuel Alito and Kenneth Starr -- homely, brainy Debate Club types who embraced conservatism as a form of revenge against the swinging '60s liberals.And during the Bush administration, the weenie boys got their revenge on the more conventional types. Too bad the weenies didn't care too much about governing effectively.
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Bob Novak's book is called "Prince of Darkness," which only goes to show that once in a great while, the man says something accurate. I have no idea what is in the book but I imagine it is a clone of every other self-righteous right-wing tome that has been inflicted upon us for some time now. Here we have a man who is perfectly willing to work hand-in-claw with Dick Cheney's office and leak Valerie Plame's name to the press yet when it comes to real journalism Novak is AWOL. Where are the columns about Poverty and the dangerous level of inequality between rich and poor in the US? Where is he when we learn that still more people have less health insurance coverage? Where is he when the topic is our racially scarred criminal justice system? This country has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. We lock people up at approximately five times the rate of other industrial countries. Non-violent drug offenders are locked up into what can only be called crime training centers. But the prison industrial complex isn't on Novak's agenda. We’ve witnessed the worst crime wave in the corporate boardrooms in history. Enron and WorldCom are infamous, but the leaders of hundreds of Fortune 500 companies have admitted to cooking their books and backdating their pensions. Increasingly, CEOs plan not to build companies over the long-term, but to cash out in the short term. No cryptic biting commentary about that Bob? No "outing" of the executives in question? Of course not. "Weenie-boys" don't care about such things. Shape up Novak, or get the hell out of journalism.
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