Posted by
Billy email MADBillyD@aol.com on Wednesday, August 13, 2008 10:15:22 PM
I haven't read Robert Novak's column in 10 years.
Back in 1998, he made a comment on CNN -- what it was is not material here -- that I considered beyond the pale. I decided I could henceforth do without his opinions and insights. He impressed me as a distinctly disagreeable man. And that was well before he outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.
When the news broke a few days ago that Novak had a brain tumor and would retire, I was not made prostrate by grief. What I felt was that whisper of common mortality, that sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God one usually feels when tragedy strikes someone who is known to you, but not too closely. I felt sorry for the man and for his loved ones. It did not occur to me to celebrate their misfortune.
(The above is part of a column Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote. see more of it below.)
There is nothing new here of course. Similar responses attended the late Tony Snow's battle with the cancer that took his life. And Michael Savage, a barely-housebroken radio personality, played a song by the Dead Kennedys when news broke that Sen. Edward Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer.
(Pitts is right those on the left should not rejoice when somebody like Snow dies or should us on the right be happy when Sen. Kennedy is told he has cancer. We all should be willing to pray for others when they are in need no matter what their politics might be. Read the whole column `Politics as war is not pretty'.)