Recently retired columnist and consummate Republican insider Robert Novak may not have been 100% bad: in 2002, he wrote a column pointing out that the US sold biological weapons to Iraq, and ridiculing Donald Rumsfeld's denials of it. Again: Bob Novak, not 100% bad. [Washington Independent]

Hawk-faced elderly man James Brady, the name-dropping veteran of 600 media outlets who has now eased into his retirement job as Forbes' "media columnist" (ha), is primarily skilled at being befuddled about the point of things (though he hasn't lost his name-dropping talent). So faced with an early copy of former crackhead-turned Times columnist David Carr's (well-reviewed) new book-which is not, as Brady hoped, a volume of media name-dropping-Brady panics in print like the senile Uncle Junior in The Sopranos: shoot the bad man and run hide in the closet! See, Brady really wanted this book to be a recitation by Carr of media inside-baseball stuff. "What a glorious read that would be, and what a column or two I could get out of it," he writes. But no-it's full of drug shit!

Andrea Peyser, the Post's fire-breathing outrage columnist and dedicated cock-looker, spends her entire column today saying, essentially, "I don't even care about your stupid party." It seems Peyser went to attend a press conference for "YouTube divorce troll Tricia Walsh-Smith," and they wouldn't let her in! What's the reason for this lack of graciousness? Peyser thinks it's because she wants to fuck Walsh-Smith's elderly, gray "smoking hot" husband:

Times columnist Joe Nocera is a busy man, and he doesn't have time for flackery and foolishness. But he recently got one press release "so brazen, so craven, so mind-bogglingly inane" that he had to put it on his blog for the world to revile. And coincidentally it's from a flack who also blogs at Huffington Post! Do you need to make sure all the other moms in the park are insanely jealous of you and your stylish little drooling brood? Let Amanda Christine Miller tell you how to turn your children into mere fashion accessories!

Peggy Noonan was the Ronald Reagan's best speechwriter because she basically writes like he thought—with hypnotic banality—and for years she wrote a wacky little opinion column that was read only by Matt Drudge and people who found it hilarious. But this year everything's different! Peggy Noonan's a phenomenon! Jacob Bernstein says she won the Democratic primary! What was her secret? She just did something she's done for years—hate Hillary Clinton.

The Juergen Teller shots of Victoria Beckham for Marc Jacobs' spring ad campaign were met with the usual awed glee when they were released earlier this year. But now there's a backlash! Liz Jones, a columnist at the Daily Mail, is worried that these ads "sum up just what's WRONG with high fashion." Specifically, she thinks the ads are "cruel," because they amount to an in-joke by the photographer and stylists to make Beckham appear gawky and helpless without the aid of Jacobs' fabulous fashion. Well, we do agree the ads are dumb. But Jones' accusation that they show Beckham "seemingly worshipping at the altar of designer fashion" is an equally dumb tautology. And while we applaud her confessional tone about being a slave to designers, it appears that someone has slapped this columnist upside the head with the "Obvious Day" stick:

Ramiro Burr, a longtime music writer and columnist at the San Antonio Express-News, has resigned from the paper in the face of "allegations that he hired a ghost writer to produce more than 100 stories and columns since 2001." Wow. Didn't it used to be that only journalism's upper crust muckety-mucks hired ghost writers for their columns, like when Mort Zuckerman got Harry "Mr. Tina Brown" Evans to work on his columns in US News & World Report? That sort of thing is expected amongst the elites. But the Latin music critic in San Antonio? Where's the amusing elitism in that? The ghost writer came forward only looking for bylines, and gave a binder full of proof of how he would crank out columns and then pass them on to Burr. And Burr's half-ass non-denial on his own blog makes him sound pretty guilty:

Are you one of the apologist types who argues that not all hip hop music is ignorant, antisocial filth? Please excuse New York Sun columnist and bizarre racial thinker John McWhorter as he shakes his head in exasperation at your foolish "fallacy." Did you know that the urban black demographic has problems with crime and education? Let's hear you defend your precious "conscious" rap now! How does the irredeemable evil of all rap music ever recorded logically follow from the existence of social problems? John McWhorter will tell you how: with some terrifying lyrics from The Roots, proving that hip hop will be our generation's downfall:

Salon's clinically insane advice columnist Cary Tennis today gets the chance to respond to the most stereotypical post-college question imaginable. A 24-year-old girl moved to LA to get into the film industry, found out it was shady, and got bummed out. Now she can't decide whether to move home to Florida and save up some money, or go backpacking across Thailand on a spiritual journey. We've all been there! Ann Landers gets 46 letters identical to this every week. So how does our friend Cary handle this easy setup? With his trademark brand of scary, dissociated ramblings indicative of an advanced case of schizophrenia or excessive mescaline use:

On the safe-for-women news site WowoWow today, octogenarian Post gossip queen Liz Smith weighs in with her opinion of bosses: "My boss is an absolute total shit!" Goodness, Liz! "As I have a lot of bosses in this world just as newspaper, magazine-writing, TV-appearing, Internet-contributing souls all have, I will not identify just which particular boss this is," she adds. But of course, we know exactly who she's talking about.

John McWhorter—Bill Buckley-esque NY Sun columnist and bizarre racial thinker—has taken his bizarre racial thinking act over to the New York Times for a day, presumably because conservative black academic columnists are hard to come by in New York City on a holiday weekend. In a video debate on the Times' website, McWhorter advances the novel theory that Barack Obama doesn't have to worry about racism; just his race. Here's an example of a statement that he says is not racist: "I won't vote for a black person because he's a radical type and would bring in Farrakhan." And hey, how come black people can hang around each other and it's okay, but white people can't? It's because "white people aren't allowed to be diverse." Okay! The other guy is, frankly, no match for McWhorter's secret redefinitions of words that negate their own meaning. The baffling debate, after the jump.

Last weekend Barack Obama once again revealed his anti-Americanism when he told a crowd, "We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees all the time, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK." Hey, maybe Barack can speak for the Muslims who won't eat as much as they want. But Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran is sick of you arugula-scarfing elites telling him and his family what to eat. And his trip to some Jewish restaurant in New York proves he's right, somehow!

Though he does not know it, Verlyn Klinkenborg is my nemesis. He's a member of the New York Times editorial board. Like all of the board's members, he has the privilege of using the most valuable op-ed space in American newspapers as a bulletin board for his personal musings. Verlyn takes advantage of this power to write regular items about "The Rural Life," all of which I can summarize as follows: "As I strolled through the country or gazed out my window, I saw nature, which I ruminated upon. Tra la, tra la, tra la." If I have to open up the Sunday paper one more time and see a chunk of editorial page real estate occupied by an "Editorial Notebook" essay inspired solely by window-gazing, I simply don't know what I will do. So Verlyn: I'd like to offer you a gentleman's agreement.

New York Sun columnist and bizarre racial thinker John McWhorter takes a wistful look back today at God and Man at Yale, crypto-fascist William F. Buckley's seminal work on how to be an uptight Ivy League conservative. Why today? Well, there's never a bad time to speak out against the outrageous marginalization of capitalism and Christianity on college campuses, in McWhorter's view, and besides, he had a column due. He thoughtfully and eloquently fellates Buckley's 1951 plea for sticks (of morality) to be inserted in asses (of Christianity) throughout our nation's top schools. And you know—not to be immodest—McWhorter can't help but see a little bit of Buckley's controversial genius in himself:

Two things I'm noticing about cock-spying New York Post columnist of evil Andrea Peyser: first, her columns are something like 300 words long. Even Post readers could be expected to puzzle through a bit more than that. Second, she's a racist, past even an ironic point of amusement. That's not news, but it does make for some harsh reading first thing in the morning. It's hard to tell whether she's a just-showing-off Ann Coulter-style racist, or a real nitty gritty racist from birth, but either way, she gets the job done. For racism! Today, she takes a bold, racist stance on rappers, what with all their shooting guns and hurling Blackberries and who knows what else. They're not even people; they're just "things":

New York Post columnist Charles Hurt's demand is tired and banal: someone "stick a fork" in Hillary Clinton, as she's "done." We've heard it before, Chuck. Fellow Post opinion maven Andrea Peyser (or "Anrea," as her own paper calls her today) makes a fresh and exciting new demand: let's take that same fork and apply it to Vito Fossella, the Staten Island-representing congressman who pulled a Patrick Kennedy in DC last week. "Commandment No. 2: Thou shalt not acknowledge maybe Love Children." Real truth, right there. Forks for everyone! [NYP]

Denver Post columnist Al Lewis is on a crusade. A cranky Starbucks crusade! "How 'bout a slice of lemon to go with that $2.10 iced tea?" he asks, rhetorically. Because there is no lemon! Other places, they give you lemons. But fancy-schmancy Starbucks? No lemons. Don't blame Al Lewis. He's written (multiple) columns! He's sent his concerns all the way up the chain to the CEO! And now he knows why Starbucks' stock has lost half its value in a year: because they can't get Al Lewis a freakin' slice of lemon:

Gawker, yesterday: "Anyway we can't wait to see what new way [Maureen Dowd] comes up with of calling Barack Obama a fag tomorrow." Maureen Dowd, today: "As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it's as though she's crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence." Guess who the "butterfly" is. [NYT]

The headline of this post is also the actual headline of a story in the New York Sun today. We didn't even change it, because it was already funny! The peppy little broadsheet reasons that since London just elected an ex-journalist as mayor, hey, why not here? And the neocon paper rounds up the very cream of the city's third-tier columnist crop to explain why such a feat be might hard for a member of the embittered, self-important writing class to pull off: because columnists "have too much integrity."

Cary Tennis: Your Source For Stone Cold Crazy Advice. The Salon advicemonger and generally confused and confusing man today receives a sincere question from a girl about her hard-partying friend, who gets drunk and cheats on her boyfriend, most recently by having "consensual, unprotected sex with one of the Marines" that she met on a night out. What should she do to help her friend? Cary Tennis makes sure she regrets that she ever asked that question. Because Cary Tennis can read her friend's mind: