Burnt Orange Report

Slap me silly

By Jim Dallas

I was in the Houston airport a few days ago and saw the cover of this year's Time "Person of the Year" edition. I thought it was pretty cheesy to call Bush an "American Revolutionary." I didn't buy it though, because I'm more of a Newsweek person and also I was running short on cash.

Matt Taibbi, via James Wolcott, on the other hand, did buy the magazine, and here's what he has to say:

Every damned year we go through this.

But this year, Taibbi writes, was the worst.

"The 'Person of the Year' issue has always been a symphonic tribute to the heroic possibilities of pompous sycophancy, but the pomposity of this year's issue bests by a factor of at least two or three the pomposity of any previous issue. From the Rushmorean cover portrait of Bush (which over the headline 'An American Revolutionary' was such a brazen and transparent effort to recall George Washington that it was embarrassing) to the 'Why We Fight' black-and-white portraiture of the aggrieved president sitting somberly at the bedside of the war-wounded, this issue is positively hysterical in its iconolatry. One even senses that this avalanche of overwrought power worship is inspired by the very fact of George Bush's being such an obviously unworthy receptacle for such attentions. From beginning to end, the magazine behaves like a man who knocks himself out making an extravagant six-course candlelit dinner for a blow-up doll, in an effort to convince himself he's really in love.

Now I'm thinking I should have bought the magazine just to see the train wreck myself.