July 02, 2004
We’re Outraged? No doubt, dear
We’re Outraged?
No doubt, dear reader, you are aware of The Nation, the trendy lefty rag edited by Katrina vanden Heuvel. Ever since Christopher Hitchens left this sordid forum, it has been an intellectual disaster: Poorly argued articles rant and rave about the latest political matters. Any magazine that makes Eric Alterman seem like a beacon of rationality is surely chock-a-block with idiotic ideologues.Still, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” like to keep up with our friends at The Nation, to check in on their latest overwrought tantrums. Each day, in fact, we click on Matt Bivens’ portion of the on-line version of the journal, “The Daily Outrage.” According to Mr. Bivens, his daily installments prove to be “your last best hope to keep up with the blizzard of Bush-era bad news.”
Well, apparently our “last best hope”—nice turn of phrase, that—ran dry. For weeks now, Mr. Bivens has been strangely silent. His latest post from “The Daily Outrage” claims that the feature is “on hiatus.”
We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” don’t know what to make of Mr. Bivens’ sudden burst of inaction. Perhaps he is having trouble happening upon things that he finds, well, outrageous? After all, how many times can you blather on about the purported Police State established by the Bush Administration before it gets a little bit stale?
Alternatively, perhaps Mr. Bivens is simply on vacation, and thus has taken a rest from the grueling job of composing a few paragraphs describing the Third Reich-esque country that America has become. Maybe he’s spending his time off building homes for the homeless. Or, more likely, he’s pontificating to other well-off lefties the views he would normally be describing in his column.
Whatever the reason, Mr. Bivens’ lack of productivity has left us, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” simply outraged. In fact, if we think hard enough about it, we imagine that we could be outraged about it on a daily basis.
After all, as regular readers of our humble “weblog” know, we are on a summer hiatus ourselves. And though we don’t promote ourselves as the “last best” anything, we have found the time to put together a few posts a week.
Why has Mr. Bivens, whose erstwhile quotidian rants were clearly a national treasure, been slacking? As Bob Dole once asked: Where’s the outrage?
