Gerard Van der Leun, Editor-In-Chief of Pajamas Media, doesn't like Vanity Fair's James Wolcott very much. And since Gerard has solid instincts, except for his unfathomable dislike of polar fleece, it's no surprise that Wolcott has gone all medieval on Claudia Rosett's idea of keeping John Bolton at the U.N.
It's hard to know which droplets of his own stupidity to start flicking back at Wolcott first. His dislike of Rosett, whose intellectual shoelaces he is unfit to tie and whose name he can't even spell? His disdain for Bolton, who dared NOT to kiss the rear end of the U.N. apparatchiks? How about Wolcott's simple allergy to fact checking?
Vanity Fair probably pays Wolcott for his blog. They, and he, are about as high maintenance and pretentious as it's possible to be in print, full of glossy Hollyweird righteousness and secularist superiority. Perfect examples of the old media, which simply can't understand why we don't worship at their thrones of journalistic perfection.
So when Wolcott wanted a small and defenseless blogger to humiliate, he turned to me. Someone must have sent him a link to my embarrassingly wrong election predictions, and my offer to "hold the shoebox" for the collection to pay Bolton's salary. Wolcott breezed over to my blog, glanced at the picture of my son at the top, and tapped out a withering critique referring to me as "he". A perfectly natural mistake, if you're a link-whore and attention hog who posts only pictures of YOURSELF.
(For the record - I can only wish I was the young man in the picture. My oldest son is, unlike Wolcott, a consummate professional and a wonderful human being. He's a firefighter who saves lives, not an out-of-shape, overpaid, pandering pontificator. And he triple checks EVERYTHING he does.)
I've apologized and abased myself for being so wrong about the elections. I'm waiting to hear from Wolcott, who thought that "AskMom's Album" and "AskMom" were synonymous. But I suspect my only consolation will be the rhetorical company of other Wolcott rejects; and with the likes of Rosett, Bolton and Van der Leun, that is marvelous consolation indeed.
