Don't Piss off the NY Press...

Its "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" list is here.

Two particularly spoke to me:

45. Max Boot
Writer, Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard

Though a resident of leafy suburban Larchmont, NY, where manly intellectuals like him go to become child molesters, Max Boot arrives to the WSJ offices decked in leather bomber, riding crop and knee-high shit-kickers. We know this from his WSJ commentaries, including his now-infamous piece complaining that not enough American lives were lost in the invasion of Afghanistan. "President Bush promised that this would not be another bloodless, push-button war, but that is precisely what it has been," intoned the wonk whose idea of a battle is finding Saturday parking in downtown Greenwich. "Our bombing campaign…does not show that we have the determination to stick a bayonet in the guts of our enemy..." Writing more recently in the New York Times, the lunatic enthused on the American occupation of the Philippines that ended in the deaths of 200,000 Filipinos: "It was a long, hard, bloody slog." Curiously, we're told this also describes sex with Boot's wife.

This one, though, absolutely took the cake.

41. Norman Podhoretz
Editor Emeritus, Commentary

It's been a good millennium so far for the city's most loathsome elderly intellectual. The Bush White House awarded ol' Poddy the Presidential Medal of Honor last year for his decades of tireless support for arms racing, unprovoked aggression and death squads. His wife Midge Decter, meanwhile, was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her decades of faithful imitation of a menopausal Mathew Arnold. His leaden-witted son John finally escaped the shadow of fellow mini-con William Kristol and took over that sophisticated journal of ideas known as the New York Post op-ed page. Just half a bloodline away, son-in-law Elliot Abrams wormed his way back into the foreign policy establishment like Iran-Contra never happened. So you'd think Stormin' Norman would be happy. Hell, last year the Free Press even published a 500-page Norman Podhoretz Reader. But Norman ain't happy. Norman's never happy. His latest piece in Commentary is one long cry of pain and hurt that his own designation for the Clash of Civilizations—"World War IV"—hasn't yet become an international relations meme on par with Walter Lippman's "Cold War" or the central, permanent organizing principle for Western Civilization, aka the American imperium, with him and Midge at the stormy helm. Someone needs to just die already.

Rough stuff, that.