Vanity Fair Draws the Battle Lines

Reading Vanity Fair is always an adventure in monotony. Every issue is the same: Movie star on the cover, self-indulgent columns by burned-out phonies like Dominick Dunne, overlong features on stale subjects, and at least two or three attacks on the Bush administration. The November issue features a particularly noxious example of the latter -- written by a ditz named Evgenia Peretz and entitled "High Noon in Crawford." (Not online.)

Peretz draws the battle lines right up front -- the good people, principally the Gold Star Moron Cindy Sheehan, vs. the evil, out-of-touch, jackass president. The former is treated as saintly, courageous. "It has been left to Cindy Sheehan to expose the hollowness of Bush's cowboy populism," is one typical line from the piece.

The article is maintly devoted to pap like that, sugaring over Sheehan's extremist rants and endorsements by the likes of David Duke and Nazis. "Far from the treasonous left-wing crackpot she has been painted to be by many of the right-wing pundits, Sheehan was a Catholic youth minister." OK. Good point. Let's be accurate: she's a treasonous left-wing crackpot former Catholic youth minister.

When Peretz is not boosting (belatedly and lamely, this being Vanity Fair) the jughead Sheehan, she is seeking out the people in Crawford who don't much care for Bush, and taking the usual potshots at Bush you've read a thousand times.

Overall, this is very much what you would get in Counterpunch, except that the ads feature semi-nude models pushing Prada and Smirnoff instead of books with titles like "The Case Against Israel."

I guess that's the choice nowadays in Moonbatland. You can take your anti-Bush polemics with soft-core porn or hard-core Jew-baiting.