TheAgitator.com
Bob Novak, RIP
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Novak was one of the few Washington pundits who regularly did actual reporting. I didn’t agree with all of his politics, but he deserves a ton of credit for that. He was also nobody’s hack. I’ve always respected him for opposing the war in Iraq—both of them, actually.
Tim Carney, who worked for Novak, has a nice appreciation.
Also, the picture of Novak now running at Drudge is pretty badass.
And yet, you’d think he’s the antichrist based on how the average democrat feels about his exposure of Valerie Plame, a “no official cover” operative who, according to Wikipedia, usually used her real name when working overseas…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-official_cover
Oh yes, outing a NOC is no big deal.
Novak sold his soul to Cheney in the Palme affair.
May he burn in hell.
[...] Doherty on Rose Friedman Doug Mataconis on Rose Friedman Radley Balko on Robert Novak Grover Norquist on Robert [...]
The Plame affair WAS a bunch of BS and the most of MSM fell for it hook line and sinker … please don’t re-open that old wound. With the recent lefty influx on this site, we could end up with another 200+ comment post.
For anyone who still POSSIBLY believes the Wilson/Plame BS …. http://www.slate.com/id/2148555
Aresen – I’ve asked elsewhere, but do you have any evidence that that is what happened?
Smearing someone fairly is one thing, but doing it without evidence is monstrous.
Whether you agreed with him or not, at least Novak was a geunine journalist and columnist of the old school and had the courage of his convictions, signed his name to his opinions, for better or worse, and had the sources, the gravitas and the chops to defend his positions in a public forum for decades. Along with his late partner, Rollie Evans, Novak made the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly and Beck look like the shallow, cheap carnival barkers that they are. No doubt he is in Heaven or Hell, at Satan or God’s ear, depending on your point of view, already demanding a cut in the capital gains tax for eternity. RIP Robert Novak and condolences to your family.
eh, he was often good … and usually credible. but are our standards for journalists that low now? i mean, is anyone on this site reading people that are below that standard?
my personal affinity for him aside, its hard not to call the Plame hackery. if you re-read the piece where he “outed” her (not the sexy kind), there is NO reason for him to have written it than to curry favor with, or do the bidding of, VP Cheney.
hard to see it any other way. but i am sad that he is gone and Scarbro-Limbau-Stewar-Oberman is still here
We need to out more CIA agents. They don’t do us any good. RIP.
Novak was an ass.
I used to see him almost every year at the ACC tournament sitting in the Maryland section sneering at everyone and everything around him. Fuck the turtle.
I didn’t like his politics. I didn’t like his writing. I didn’t like his arrogance. I didn’t like him.
I won’t miss him.
#3 “May he burn in hell.”
This is the level of discourse this country has sunk to; sad. The man has died and whether you agreed with him or not, no one deserves that sort of statement. Shame on you Aresen.
“He was also nobody’s hack.”
Actually, it would be more correct to say that he wasn’t just anybody’s hack. He hacked for a select group of key right-wingers with power. Not a streetwalker, but a very, very, very exclusive prostitute with a very limited clientele.
When Novak was right, he was on the money. When he was wrong, he went all the way wrong. Robert Novak didn’t half ass anything.
The whole Plame thing seemed like one group of bad guys in a screaming match with another group of bad guys. I have a hard time finding reason to support one side over the other.
“Whether you agreed with him or not, at least Novak was a geunine journalist ”
Really? I always saw Novak as a Politician posing
as a journalist; ie,the agenda came first,
and the reporting revolved around and catered to it.
The Plame outing was a perfect example. How did
mentioning that Wilson’s wife was an “operative”
bolster the merit of the article?
I sometimes defended Novak by comparing him to the incredibly low op-ed standard for actual journalism. On the op-ed pages, you have gossipers like Maureen Dowd, purported solons whose reason for being considered such has been long forgotten, like George Will and Richard Cohen, rewrite experts like Eugene Robinson, bright but intentionally misleading polemicists like Krauthammer, and then you’ve had Novak, who was really the last of a breed– a journalist who actually cultivated sources and could be seen breaking the occasional story.
His glory days were long behind him when he disclosed Plame’s identity, though. He had really just become a flack for certain GOP interests, and he had become the willing tool of the sources he cultivated.
The Post’s treatment of him today was pretty sickening: a front page story with a full-page jump, an editorial, an op-ed, and a Howard Kurtz story above the fold on the front of the style page.
As for his role in outing Plame: Novak’s judgment was off, but the guy was a reporter, and it wasn’t his job to protect her identity. The opprobrium for leaking it certainly falls on the Bush officials who did so, not on Novak. I will note, though, that there are a lot of journalists who fault him tremendously for so willingly going before the grand jury and spilling his guts about his sources.
He also published a bunch of lies about Janet Reno based on the word of soviet spy Robert Hanssen that he didn’t even attempt to verify. While he actually did do some “reporting”, it often consisted of calling up people to get them to spin their version of the story off the record and avoided discussing policies on their merits but instead dealt with petty personal issues. What were the important stories that he broke?
Let the meshumad burn. Notwithstanding Wm. F. Buckley’s philosemitism, I doubt Novak (and Joel Rosenberg too) would have been so warmly received at National Review had his spiritual journey taken him from Catholicism to Judaism instead of the other way around.
It would be the first time the left has gotten outraged over a violation of national security rather than either defending the people behind it as misunderstood or just doing it to harm someone.
#15– You must be young. Dig up some of his work with Evans. He was a journalist and a columnist in whose era has all but died now.
I didn’t know anything about Novak -
Now I do.
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/7138/noted-anti-semitedead-conservatives-pat-buchanan-lament-friend-of-hamas-robert-novak/
BoogerPresley, that’s what nearly every (liberal) MSM reporter does all the time … but they are ‘un-biased’ …. right. At least with Novak we knew where he stood rather than him pretending to have no personal bias whatsoever.
As to the Plame affair:
A) there was no LEAK ….. she was NOT undercover. Period.
B) Some Democrat Senators (including John F’in Kerry) ACTUALLY outed UNDERCOVER agents and the MSM did their usual crappy job covering that.
So color me unimpressed with the whole faux Plame affair.
I didn’t realize that Janet Reno and the CIA had some many defenders on here.
Irrespective of the Plame outing and whether you think she was covert (and the head of the CIA testified that yes, she was covert, and her neighbors had no idea that she was CIA; guess they weren’t in on DC’s most well-known secret) the original Plame article was Novak trying to discredit Wilson and his assertion that Iraq wasn’t trying to acquire Nigerian “yellowcake” which was being used as a premise for going to war with Iraq. We now know that this was a lie and Novak allowed himself to be used to smear someone who was telling the truth. This wasn’t an aberration, it was Novak’s M.O.
and it’s not a matter of defending Reno and/or the CIA, but the truth.
Since there’s no posting for him, I will leave one here: Rest in Peace, Don Hewitt. And thank you for helping to birth television news.