InkReader L.B. avers that we don’t have enough loathly ladies on our list of “Women We Hate” links on the IWF home page. L.B. writes
“Obviously absent: Molly Ivins, Katrina Van den Heuvel. These ‘acerbic’ hostile women are professional hate-sellers; they are perpetual peddlers of fabricated extremist propaganda.”
Well said, L.B. We’ve been taking potshots at Molly “Y’All Come” Ivins ourselves, especially her penchant for unattributed quote-borrowing in her faux-twangy syndicated column and elsewhere. Such as that oft-quoted crack about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s supposed resemblance to “a condom stuffed with walnuts,” a simile invented by Brit media critic Clive James years ago, not Ivins recently, as she would have you believe (see “Mailbag: Molly Ivins’s Walnut Problem,” Dec. 30). Van den Heuvel, however, doesn’t have a column of her own, but instead vents in The Nation plus whatever TV chat-gigs she can wangle her way onto. Maybe we need a list of “Magazines We Hate”? Or “Telly Chatters Who Make Us Ralph”?
InkReader A.F. chides:
“I’m suprised you didn’t mention [see “2003: A Moving Movie Year,” Dec. 31, below] the superb pro-American documentary film Spellbound, which Slate has just awarded movie of the year. It also lost out to Bowling for Columbine at the Oscars.”
Right. And “Spellbound” was a real documentary, about real people (the children of immigrants who excel at spelling bees), not a staged hit job that blamed the Columbine massacre on everyone except the pampered brats who did it. A.F. also includes this link to David Edelstein’s fine review of “Spellbound” in Slate.
And InkReader B.O. complains that two Charlottes on InkWell aren’t enough:
“I miss the old website. Now there are only two women posting on the blogstream. I bet you don’t have as many visitors now. Very sad.”
Fear not, B.O. We’re cloning more Charlottes even as you write.