Liberals That You Like (Name The Liberals That You LIKE!!!)

Self | April 15, 2002 | PJ-Comix

[Axelsrd]

Terri Welles...Now that's a good one...hehehe

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Pat Caddell(SP?)

Agree. He also called a spade a spade during Al Gore's attempted election fraud.

[Charlotte Corday]

Joan Baez - did not sell out to the Stalinists like so many of the '60's peacenik movement. Traveled to Eastern Europe a number of times in the 70's and 80's in support of Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and others.

[balrog666]

How about Christopher Hitchens?

Extremely intelligent, well educated, superbly articulate, d@mn witty, and (from all appearances) as honest as a liberal can be and not explode. I don't know why he isn't a libertarian-anarchist yet.

[PJ-Comix]

Terri Welles...

Is she a Liberal? More importantly, who even cares? I mean if you're talking to a Playmate, I don't think politics will even be on your mind. Hey, Petra Verkaik could be a flaming liberal for all I care. Makes no difference to me.

[volchef]

You forgot the classic "Tourist Season". This is a must read if you love satiric mysteries. He's liberal all right, but mainly about environmental issues in Florida and many Freepers would love him because he absolutely despises Walt Disney World.

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

For all his wrongheaded views, Alan Colmes seems like a good guy

Alan Colmes reminds me of one of those DUM-DUM bullets in the movie, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBITT?

A dim bulb, and that's being charitable.

[BluesDuke]

Murray Kempton, of blessed memory. He was the most graceful prose stylist I have ever read in daily newspapers in my own lifetime other than William F. Buckley, Jr. (who happened to be his longtime friend - and who nagged him long enough that he finally assembled and published, in 1993, his splended anthology, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events), and he was one liberal who didn't suffer fools or B.S. artists gladly even in his own ideological camp. It was Kempton who actually began the pinpricking of Lillian Hellman's unwarranted reputation as a courageous liberal crusader (she, like her lover Dashiell Hammett, was a Communist; Kempton had become an anti-Communist liberal in the early 1950s, when he was making his reputation as a sharp reporter on the organised labour beat), when he exposed a few of the more pointed falsities in her despicable Scoundrel Time ("I would not want her overly much as a comrade," Kempton purred witheringly in the piece); it was Kempton, moreover, who was the first - and, for time enough, the only - liberal to say forthrightly that Bill Clinton was a disreputably untrustworthy liar even before Droopy-Drawers got elected. He also skewered Jimmy Carter - possibly the first liberal to do so - when it was exposed that Carter, in the runup to the Persian Gulf war, had written the heads of state of the U.N. Security Council member countries asking them not to support what began as Operation Desert Shield. ("Such," Kempton fumed, "is the inescapable effrontery of anyone who sets out to persuade the voters that they were wrong not to re-elect a saint." I have saved a copy of this column.)

And, as ironic as it may seem to many, Richard Nixon received no more empathetically humane sendoff in print - both in the last days of his illness and upon his death - than the four columns Murray Kempton composed in tribute in New York Newsday. (Kempton, interestingly, had long acknowledged a personal affection for Nixon that traced back to when one of Kempton's own children had been killed in an accident - Nixon had sent him a particularly embracing personal note of sympathy, and it touched Kempton deeply enough that he took pains to distinguish writing about Nixon politically from writing about Nixon personally, which may explain in part why Kempton was never considered material for the enemies list...)

He could also write with grace and insight about matters out of the political bullring - I have read essays by Kempton on Louis Armstrong, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, and the 1962 Mets that deserve wider reading. (As a matter of fact, Kempton's essay on the 1962 Mets and the return of the National League to New York is included in the new anthology edited by Nicholas Dawidoff, Baseball: A Literary Anthology.) In fact, Kempton received a Grammy award in 1986 for his contribution to the Frank Sinatra box set, The Voice: The Columbia Years, 1941-52; it was Kempton who wrote the gracious liner note to the fourth album in the box, Standards.

Kempton was something of a character in his understated, gentlemanly way. He was famous for making his way around New York City on a classic old three-speed bicycle of the sort we called, ages ago, the English racer. I sometimes saw him pedaling about - he was impossible to miss, with his shock of whitening red hair and horn-rim, almost military-style eyeglasses, and his overcoat, aboard that bicycle. In fact, when New York Newsday launched a brisk television ad campaign to promote the paper, they amplified Kempton as a selling point, showing him tooling about on his bike, then panning to a closeup-enough view of him, with the man himself saying, "I guess I've been around so long that people think they kind of have to like me." (This was shortly after Kempton won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, in 1985, an award that prompted George F. Will to note that it finally honoured "the class of our class".)

My favourite story about Murray Kempton (other than his having been a personal copy boy for H.L. Mencken for the last national convention Mencken ever covered, in 1948, before the stroke that forced his retirement): He was attending an awards ceremony for a prize given to journalists that was named after a reporter, I forget whom specifically. At the end of the evening, he lamented to his dinner companion that the one prize he wished he had ever won was this particular prize. His companion was astonished. "But Murray, you've won the Pulitzer!" "The Pulitzer," Kempton answered, "is named for a publisher. I'm rooting for my real friends - the reporters."

[LarryLied]

Leon Botstein,music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. President of Bard college. Occasional guest on Nightline and PBS. Leon is the only liberal I've ever heard put forth a proposal to reform government schools which does not call for more money. He says that if something is failing, why do more of it? Why lengthen the time to fail? Why have pre-school or an extra year tacked on at the end?

His plan is to turn K-12 into k-10 (he suggests chopping off a year at the start so kids can be with their parents if possible). Leon wants kids out of High School by age 16. He cies two reasons. People mature earlier than they did 50 years ago. Mixing 14 year olds and 18 year olds is not a good idea. He also thinks kids should take two years off before college to either work or travel.

[InvisibleChurch]

I like 'apply liberally' so that my hair looks nice and shiny.

[M Kehoe]

My brother and sister-in-law.

Sorry, I can't think of any others.

5.56mm

[The Great Satan]

I've never met him, but that does sound pretty nuts. He does rant and rave about corporations and crap like that, but I've always thought of him as just a confused fifties-type liberal for whom the penny never dropped.

[SpringheelJack]

Charlie Rangel. His politics suck, but I always enjoy watching him get interviewed on TV. He's a very engaging man.

[Dog Gone]

Chris Matthews is a likeable liberal, especially when he is ripping Paul Begala a new one.

[PJ-Comix]

Man. Who haven't you run into?

When you live in L.A. you run into celebs all the time.

[Doomonyou]

Jerry Brown -for starting military acadamy in Oakland.

Ditto.

Moon Beam is actually a decent mayor of Oakland.

[ArcLight]

What a jerky thing to say, ex...pray for the man, okay?

[sayfer bullets]

nice idea.

From the "I am what I am" respect-for-honesty department:
(notice what these names have in common) David Boren, Sam Nunn, Moynahan, Tip O'neil.
- You wanted to punch their lights out sometimes, but you could at least respect them. I'll even consider including Wellstone and Phil Donahue just because they're man-enough not to lie about their liberalness....well, there was that dress thing. ok, maybe not.

Barbara Bush.

Juan Williams, Colmes.

James Garner. (how disappointed was I when I learned).

Brad Pitt. (Hilarious in Twelve Monkeys).

Bono?...nope, gotta get a second name first. sharp guy though.

[jpsb]

Bush, both dad and this two sons.

[PJ-Comix]

I've never met him, but that does sound pretty nuts.

Are you talking about Jerry Brown? Yeah, he is so nutty that it is actually amusing. I sure hope he runs for President in 2004 so as to raise the entertainment value of the Demmycrat primary (although Sharpton already promises to provide lots of entertainment and laughs at the expense of the other candidates.)