James J. Kilpatrick, 1920-2010

never heard of him

“Shana, you ignorant slut…” ringing any bells?

@Capt Howdy: “Jane, you ignorant slut.”

Wait, that was Aykroyd. But Jack Kilpatrick was the target — his 60 Minutes mini-debates with Shana Alexander, before Andy Rooney stepped in to play Old Fart instead.

He was an ignorant idiot (Saturday Night Live reference).

He held up the conservative end of a running debate with Shana Alexander on 60 Minutes back in the day.

Compared to 99% of today’s right wing pundits, he was an intellectual giant. However, he still was an ignorant idiot.

@nojo: Jinx.

Though you got me on the slut/idiot reference.

@Mistress Cynica: Same comment as with respect to Nojo.

@Walking Still: I can still hear my dorm roomie repeating the line, and doing it a lot better than I could.

@nojo:
I guess it was not before my time but before I was paying attention.

@Walking Still:
yeah
weird to think of people like him and Buckley as the good old days.

@nojo:
still getting my mind around the fact that there was an OLDER fart than Andy Rooney. for some reason I always thought he was the original old fart.

@Mistress Cynica:
query:

did he actually say that. on 60 minutes?

@Capt Howdy: Rooney was the original old fart — his segment replaced Point/Counterpoint.

What I can’t get my mind around is that Andy Rooney was an old fart thirty years ago.

@Capt Howdy: No, that was part of the SNL skit. You could tell he was thinking it, though

@nojo:
yeah
whos an old fart now?

@Mistress Cynica:
interesting. this would be 70s?
I became politically aware with the election of Reagan. before that it was all gobbledygook .

late bloomer I know. I was 29

@Capt Howdy: Ah yes, the 70s. I come from a very political family, so I was always aware of these things, but my fascination really took off during the Nixon years, culminating in the Watergate hearings. I had the transcripts. I guess I was the politics version of the sci-fi geek, who stayed inside a beach house half that summer watching Senator Sam grill witnesses.

ADD: I was 12. As you may have guessed, I had no friends.

@Cyn: I tried to tape record Nixon’s resignation speech, until my dad guffawed and said “Everyone will have this”. Whereas at the time I thought he was ashamed, now I just think he must have invented You Tube.

@Mistress Cynica: Nixon did it for me as well. 1968 was the year with the MLK and RFK assassinations, the police riot in Chicago, culminating in the clusterfuck at the polls that gave us Tricky Dick.

I was 11. And, as you may have guessed, I had no friends.

P.S. I remember how shocked by grandparents were a few years later when we watched the “I am not a crook” speech, and I pointed at the screen and said ” Can’t everyone tell? He’s obviously lying.”

They didn’t like Nixon either, but they had trouble believing how cynical I was at age 16.

I’m loving these stories of political awakening. I was pretty apolitical until high school, apart from things which directly affected me (I was always very pro-busing, for example). In sixth grade another kid asked whether I was pro-choice or pro-life (and this wasn’t a Catholic school or anything) and I, ignorant of their meaning but thinking that choice and life were equally good things, replied, “Both?” The Democrat/Republican distinction was also kind of lost on me then. I remember thinking that Dole was kind of funny, probably because Norm Macdonald was nailing him on SNL, and my oldest sister, who’d read Earth in the Balance, was a big Gore fan, but neither held much sway with me. It wasn’t until 2000 that I really got fired up about it all.