Ace of Spades HQ: Beating Mark Steyn By 24 Hours

Mark Steyn notices something interesting:

The media, said Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek, in a unusual moment of candour the other day, ‘wants Kerry to win’ and so ‘they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic ...that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points’. In Fleet Street, if memory serves, an assistant managing editor is the bloke who orders the office furniture, but on Newsweek’s bulked-up masthead Mr Thomas is quite the bigshot and, just to prove his point, the magazine’s cover this week features a beaming John Kerry and a beaming John Edwards over the headline ‘The Sunshine Boys’.

That sounds pretty familiar.

And then, just to rub salt into the wound, he pounces on something I was flogging a month ago:

‘Like a caged hamster, Senator John Kerry is restless on the road. He pokes at the perimeter of the campaign bubble that envelops him, constantly trying to break out for a walk around the block, a restaurant dinner....’

Why couldn’t he have been a caged tiger? Isn’t that what she’s getting at? A noble beast, restless and prowling? A caged hamster’s never struck me as being that interested in poking the perimeter. He’s happy on his little hamster wheel, going round and round and getting nowhere, occasionally pausing to chew his nuts. But he’s not constantly trying to break out, unless he happens to be at a Hollywood fundraiser and a certain male movie star asks him back to his pad for a nightcap. Perhaps Ms Wilgoren thought the tiger was too haughty and aristocratic, and that the rodent imagery would humanise Kerry. Or perhaps, like Sinatra, the Senator has his very own Hamster Pack of buddies for when he breaks out of the bubble and gets to that restaurant.

I'd declare Mr. Steyn an enemy of this site if he weren't so damnably indispensible.