Posted on 03/29/2005 3:55:37 PM PST by fight_truth_decay
In the midst of a Sports Illustrated/CNN Sports blog entry about the NCAA men's basketball tournament, Boston Globe Magazine writer Charles Pierce, who in a 2003 article touted how if Mary Jo Kopechne had lived, "Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age," denounced columnist and CNN commentator Robert Novak. Pierce castigated Novak as "a mendacious lycanthrope" and warned CBS, which is carrying the tournament: "If you use him as a talking-head anywhere on your network, you've sacrificed credibility for celebrity in a big way."
Novak is a big college basketball fan.
Mendacious means untruthful and the Oxford dictionary defines lycanthrope as "a werewolf." It defines "lycanthropy" as "the mythical transformation of a person into a wolf. Archaic, a form of madness involving the delusion of being an animal, usually a wolf."
Clay Waters, Editor of the MRC's TimesWatch.org site (www.TimesWatch.org ), caught the remark in a Monday "e-mail conversation about the NCAA tournament" with back-to-back entries from Pierce, identified as a Boston Globe Magazine writer who also "appears regularly on National Public Radio," and Sports Illustrated senior writer Alex Wolff, "author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure."
The entry in question was headed:
From: Charles Pierce
To: Alexander Wolff
Subject: Memory lapses Sunday, March 28, 2005" [yes, Sunday was the 27th and Monday the 28th]
An excerpt from the second half of Pierce's entry:
....Sometimes, I think CBS's memory hole must be the size of Mauna Kea.
Which reminds me. You probably missed it, but CBS ran a pre-game special about the arc of the Maryland program from the death of Len Bias in 1986 to the national championship back in 2002. It was a mixed bag, even if you grant the fact that it's Easter, and that television sports just loves redemption stories even at less appropriate moments on the liturgical calendar. Anyway, it was nice to see Gary Williams get some props, and there was the expected revisionism concerning Lefty Driesell, who still has his fans in our biz, apparently.
But what was missing was a larger context. As author Dan Baum has pointed out, through the efforts of (among others) Celtics fan Tip O'Neill, Bias's death set off the anti-drug frenzy of the mid-1980s, which generally used the Bill of Rights for a bathmat, prompted a series of Draconian new laws, and spawned some godawful Pinochet Lite rhetoric that's been dusted off recently by our hysterical Steroid Apocalyptics. We learn nothing from our own mistakes except to make them all over again.
And, also, CBS? I don't care if he once wore the Terrapin costume and danced through the upper deck. Bob Novak is at all times a mendacious lycanthrope and, if you use him as a talking-head anywhere on your network, you've sacrificed credibility for celebrity in a big way.
Pierce, who has yet to Get Over It.
END of Excerpt
For the blog entry(An e-mail conversation about the NCAA tournament) in full: sportsillustrated.cnn.com
At the MRC's "DisHonors Awards for the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporting of 2003," Pierce won the "Ozzy Osbourne Award (for the Wackiest Comment)" for this assertion in a January 5, 2003 Boston Globe Magazine profile of Senator Ted Kennedy:
"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age."
Kopechne drowned in Kennedy's submerged car off Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969, an accident Kennedy did not report for several hours.
Pierce's personal home page: www.charlespierce.net
Mendacious lycanthropic misanthropist?
SEEBS has credibility?
That is what I thought to. Maybe a lycanthrope has nothing to do with lycanthrophy but they seem awful close.
Woofwoofwoofwoof
Naw, he was really thinking of Wolf Blitzer.
For starters, CBS doesn't have credibility to worry about -- that ship has sailed. Also, NPR doesn't have credibility since their totally biased reports on Terri -- and that's leaves Novak, who's just fine and credible the way he is...
He is a Fighting Illini fan and an alum. I don't know why he roots for Maryland, too.
Charles Pierce sounds like an irritable inglubian.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Please not to show that picture!
Charley is halucinating, no question. Has there ever been a concept with less substance than the "credibility of CBS?" Pierce may have talked about the "sobriety of Fat Teddy," "the integrity of democrats," or "the diversity of the Congressional Black Caucus" and come up with concepts that had more weight or substance than the "credibility of CBS."
Lykos is Greek for "wolf" (from the same Indo-European root as Latin lupus, Gothic wulfs, Old Slavic vluku, Russian volk, etc.).
There was an area near ancient Athens called Lykeion with a sanctuary of Apollo Lykeios and a gymnasium...because Aristotle lectured at that gymnasium, we have the word lyceum for educational establishments.
The epithet Lykeios ("of a wolf") was applied to Apollo either as "wolf-slayer" (shortened from lykoktonos) or as the Lycian god (the Lycians being a barbarian nation of southwestern Asia Minor).
There wolf
gotta love the classics
There is a portrait of Bob Novak, along with those of other notable alumni, in the Illini Union on the U of I campus. It may be that he lives in the Maryland suburbs and therefore feels an obligation to root for the University of Maryland as well.
Do you think he was trying to say Novak hates gymnasiums, but was doing it in an NPR/CBS sort of way, so it would be all mixed up and phony, but sound true on the surface?
I think he meant to say lycanthropic mendicant....a very, hairy beggar with sharp teeth.
So Feldman's line was "There wolf"? OK, I can live with that.
Wolfman Jack died in 1995. Maybe Novak can stake out a claim to be Wolfman Bob.
This is the kind of stuff that happens when you pickle your tongue in Teddy Kennedy's arsehole...
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