Dean Barnett, a blogger, talkshow host and sports fan died from complications arising from cystic fibrosis. Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard makes the announcement for his paper:
It’s my sad duty to report that our good friend and valued contributor Dean Barnett passed away today. He was a remarkable man–principled, witty, and to all of us, a model of grace and courage. We mourn his passing and cherish his memory.
The incidentals outlive life by a little. The mail arrives for a while; magazines keep coming until the subscriptions are cancelled. The more vibrant a life, the more threads hang in the air almost as if they were waiting for someone to complete them. There are manuscripts unfinished, chores half done. In the 1956 version of the Dambusters, the camera focuses on a clock that keeps ticking in room whose occupants will never return from that last mission over Nazi Germany. Sometimes relatives put off cleaning out the room or packing up the effects of the deceased because it almost seems as if they’ll come back. Just you wait.
The time to clean up comes when we realize that even memory is not necessary for love. Nothing is futile. Just you wait.
If you have any favorite links to his posts, please put them in comments.
He started with a blog, soxblog. I could always pick out his writing because it has a lilt to it that is distinctive to himself.
I am so sorry.
He has said, though, that he has had a much longer life than he had expected to have.
My sympathy to his wife and his family members.
We are all poorer for his passing.
“He started with a blog, soxblog. I could always pick out his writing because it has a lilt to it that is distinctive to himself.”
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His voice and the content of the show also had a lilt when he would sit in for Hewitt, teasing fellow lawyer and scholar Hewitt, and making self-deprecating comments about his Minnesota accent.
His career as a writer was just taking off…
He’ll be remembered by many, missed greatly by those close to him.
Guest host Dean Barnett
Friday, October 03, 2008
Hewitt: Hour 1,2,3…
Guest host Dean Barnett – James Lileks
Two Midwestern Boys at play…
Thursday Sep 25
Farewell, Dean
- Hugh Hewitt
“I was introduced to Dean through our mutual friend Jonathan Last, and not long thereafter suggested he join me as a blogger here, and then as a guest host on the radio program.
Simply put, he had an accent for print, but his incredible intelligence turned him into one of the most sought after guest hosts for those of us unafraid of better minds than our own filling in for us while we are obliged to be away.
But for his great love of golf Dean might have taken on full time radio work, but the combination of the opportunities allowed by new media and the regular guest hosting scratched his itch to participate in the great debates of our time. Had he had more time, he would have been one of the great influences on the GOP for as long as he lived, probably because he valued and used every minute he had.
Dean told me early in our friendship that his disease had forced him to deal with the possibility of living too short a life and that he thus threw himself into everything.
This ferocious desire to live well and fully is what I will always tell people marked Dean Barnett.
That and the love he had for his wonderful wife Kirstan and his family and friends. His extraordinary story is told in his short essay, The Smart Spunky Kid with the Fatal Disease, and his example will long be an example to others battling with Cystic Fibrosis.
I hope we can report some day soon the news that a cure for CF is in hand, and on that day toast Dean for all he did to raise awareness of the disease.
I will also toast him whenever I hear smart, persuasive arguments on behalf of common sense conservatism and fierce attachment to the opportunities liberty bestows.
He is already deeply missed, and will be always by my audience, by Duane, and of course by me.”
In “The Disappointing General Odom,” he spoke for many of us. As an Army man, I was particularly disgusted with the sorry display put on by Odom.
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/blog/g/1ff43fed-a79f-4fe8-a1a0-87378c07f724&comments=true#commentAnchor
I’m truly floored by this news and deeply mourn his passing. Dean and I occasionally swapped eMail’s. I wish I had the opportunity to personally get to know him but death stalks us all.
Dean was the best of the fill-in hosts for Hugh Hewitt. He had a personality large enough to carry the show on his own. What a tragic loss for all of us, his fans. We’ll miss him.
Dave
Dean was a terrific writer. I started reading Soxblog and followed him as he progressed to bigger blogs. We’re all going to miss his writing.
Dean was a man whose voice, intellect, words, and humor revealed a level of vitality few can match. He will be missed greatly. Though different in many ways from the beloved Tony Snow, he too had the gentleness and grace that Snow had. I hope they are covering the election together for the Heavenly Broadcast Network.
In their final fight, Robinson gave LaMotta a thrashing that “Raging Bull’s” magnificent cinematography immortalized. The frame where LaMotta’s blood sprays the first row of the crowd is the stuff of cinematic history. The ref steps in to end the fight, and a beaten but still defiant LaMotta yells repeatedly at the unemotional yet malevolent Robinson, “Ray! I never went down, Ray.”
“Raging Bull” shares with “The Sopranos” an identical overarching theme. At their heart, both are about very bad men who do very bad things and who have limitless destructive appetites. Both protagonists, though, hunger for redemption more than anything else.
It can’t be a coincedence that “The Sopranos” cited “Raging Bull” at this moment. The characters have mentioned Scorsese several times this season, and Tony Soprano shares much with the LaMotta depicted by “Marty” (as members of the Soprano crew invariably refer to Scorsese). By the end of the movie, LaMotta had lost virtually everything – his wife, his family, his money, his physique. In one heartbreaking scene, LaMotta repeatedly bangs his head against the wall of a jail cell, wondering why he did the things he did. But ultimately, Jake LaMotta never went down.
All great pieces of art engage in foreshadowing. In this season’s first episode, Tony and Bobby mused about whether you hear the killers coming when you got whacked. We knew as they discussed the subject that at least one of them would know the answer by the end of the series.
The Raging Bull scene had to be a piece of foreshadowing. Tony Soprano shares much with Jake LaMotta, from their bloated figures to their coarseness to their cruelty. They also have positive attributes. Each in his own way is introspective. Both are strong men, and both are capable of love and kindness. These are the redeeming qualities that make us root for them, even they both are ugly sociopaths.
Dean Barnett
Very good contribution, South Dakota Lawyer.
I too first starting reading his Soxblog.
I sent him an email pointing out his confusion as to the different meanings of “principle” and “principal.”
A long and pleasant email exchange followed.
I was so happy to see his writing reach even broader readership after that.
He never, to my knowledge, mixed up principle and principal again either.
The following is a great book review by Dean Barnett, published at Hugh Hewitt.com. I cannot access the page from the archives, so here is a copy I made at the time:
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Sunday Book Review: “What a Party!” by Terry McAuliffe
Posted by Dean Barnett 2:47 PM
In a way, I feel sorry for Terry McAuliffe. The subject of his autohagiography, “What a Party!”, is not without his charms. The Terry McAuliffe we come to know is indefatigable, loyal, affable and a first rate raconteur. He is also, and there’s no delicate way to put this, more full of crap and less self-aware than probably any other human being on God’s green earth.
I’m convinced that McAuliffe was undone by his ghost-writer, Steve Kettman. The McAuliffe that emerges in the pages of “What a Party” is too antic to sit still in a hospital waiting room long enough to greet the birth of his children. It Is thus a reasonable supposition that McAuliffe also lacked the genetic predisposition to tackle the tedious task of writing a 400 page book. The heavy lifting was probably left to Kettman. And Kettman, for some reason, came to hate McAuliffe and decided to write a book that would not only embarrass Terry McAuliffe but the next several generations of McAuliffes.
There are too many contradictions in “What a Party” for them to have all been an accident. For instance, McAuliffe at one point blasts one of the many lawsuits hurled at President Clinton for frivolously wasting the time of the planet’s busiest man. (Clinton, not McAuliffe.) And yet much of McAuliffe’s book is dedicated to showing Clinton and McAuliffe wasting time together. So that McAuliffe might document the closeness of their bond, we are treated to innumerable scenes of Clinton and McAuliffe on the golf course, Clinton and McAuliffe lighting up stogies on the Truman balcony, Clinton and McAuliffe sharing vacation time and even one scene where Clinton and McAuliffe go on an extended bike ride through the interior of trle White House. (Don’t ask.)
Of course, I’m kidding about Kettman deliberately setting out to sabotage McAuliffe, even though the project took Kettman over a year instead of the twelve weeks it was supposed too. “What a Party’” is pure McAuliffe – relentlessly partisan, deliberately misleading when it serves his purposes, and laughably self-important throughout.
In McAuliffe’s world, every Democrat does God’s work while every Republican (except Ed Gillespie) is practically evil incarnate. For a relatively young guy, McAuliffe has developed a lengthy list of grievances. He is convinced that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign thwarted McAuliffe patron Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free the hostages held in Iran. Predictably, he is also certain that Bush and the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election from the true victor, AI Gore. The latter claim he repeats countless times. He also maintains with admirable albeit perverse ardor that none of the Clinton scandals, from Whitewater to Monica to Marc Rich, were anything more than the creations of venal Republicans aided by a Clinton-hating media.
McAuliffe never deigns to support any of these claims. One of the few pleasures that his memoir offers is the rat-a-tat machine-gun style with which McAuliffe offers sweeping assertions. Mercifully, the book moves along quickly primarily because McAuliffe never lets himself get bogged down with details.
Or honesty. McAuliffe handles all of the claims listed above not only with his characteristic undiluted partisanship but also with naked intellectual dishonesty. It’s one thing to use such tactics on a 9 minute segment on cable news – time flies on a TV talk show and even if a guest wanted to have a detailed conversation, that’s usually not what the host has in mind. But using the same technique in a book leaves the author’s mendacity on full display.
To support his far-fetched claim regarding the Reagan campaign’s infamous October Surprise, McAuliffe cites the work of former Carter era diplomat Gary Sick. McAuliffe fails to mention that Gary Sick is a low-rent, less well-known version of Ramsey Clark. Citing him as an authoritative source is either grossly dishonest or unforgivably sloppy.
As for Gore being the victor in Florida, McAuliffe never mentions the fact that subsequent media recounts showed Bush to be the rightful victor. McAuliffe could have acknowledged this fact and still plausibly maintained that Gore should have won and would have won had a few thousand blue-hairs not been befuddled by Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballots and voted for Pat Buchanan when they intended to vote for Gore. But making this intellectually honest and actually somewhat important argument wouldn’t have jibed with his tiresome theme that Republicans are rapacious power-mongers who will happily subvert our democracy when given the chance.
But it is in dealing with the Clinton scandals, especially the Marc Rich pardon, where McAuliffe’s dishonesty shines brightest. Before getting to the Rich pardon, McAuliffe had spent several tiresome pages detailing his vital role in funding the Clinton Presidential library. McAuliffe considered the construction of the facility to be of the utmost importance. Without a first-rate Clinton library to tell the truth, Republican lies regarding Clinton might actually enter the history books.
So it is perplexing that in retelling the story of the Rich pardon, McAuliffe never mentions the fact that Denise Rich gave the Clinton library a seven figure donation. In McAuliffe’s retelling of the Rich pardon, the whole affair was a completely innocent mistake. Denise Rich’s name never even warrants a mention in “What a Partyl”
Which provides quite a sorrowful snapshot of the current state of Denise Rich’s celebrity, In spite of professing to being immune to the charms of celebrity, McAuliffe seldom goes a page without dropping the name of some famous person that he sat next to, chatted up, or hung out with at Camp David. From Jon Bon Jovi to Matt Damon to Tony Blair to Leann Rhimes to Jack Nicholson, the author who is allegedly indifferent to fame sure does enjoy telling stories of the celebrities that he’s encountered.
If “What a Party” is remembered at all, it will be for the unintentionally withering profile the author provides of himself. McAuliffe has broken no new ground in the field of intellectually dishonest political polemics. He has, however, painted an indelible picture of himself as a risibly self-important court jester, and, worse still, a court jester who plays an important role in 21st century politics because of the political class’ need for money and McAuliffe’s ability to deliver in that regard.
McAuliffe’s self-regard knows no limits, his self-importance no bounds. At one point, we see McAuliffe preparing a fundraiser for President Clinton in June of 1995, To hear McAuliffe tell it, the stakes were monumental: “The Clinton presidency was on the line.” In a fundraiser in New Jersey. In an off-year.
When you read comments like that, you have to ask yourself, “Does he really believe this stuff” I regret to say I think he does.
The most embarrassing parts of “What a Party!” detail McAuliffe’s time spent with the Clintons. He could see no wrong in the Clintons. In his retelling of things, theirs was the model marriage; yes, it was momentarily rocked by a reckless act of infidelity but in short order the President was back to being his usual uxorious self and the future Senator quickly returned to being the adoring wife she had always been.
In describing his relationship with the Clinton’s, McAuliffe comes across as an almost pathetic figure, eager to serve and unquestionably faithful. For the Clintons, he seems almost a beloved house pet: as needy for affection as the loneliest Labrador, as eager to give affection as the most smitten Golden Retriever and as annoying as the yappiest Yorkie.
Actually though, based on “What a Party!”, the canine family doesn’t provide the animal kingdom’s most apt description of Terry McAuliffe. “Perfect Jackass” hits much closer to the mark.
DamBusters
The Pilots- Part I(Wild Colonial Boys indeed)
Plt Off Taerum RCAF – Canada
Plt Off Spafford RAAF – Australia
FS Deering RAF – Ireland
Fg Off Earnshaw RCAF – Canada
Plt Off Fraser RCAF – Canada
Fg Off Burcher RAAF – Australia
Flt Lt Martin RAF – Australia
Flt Lt Leggo RAAF – Australia
Fg Off Chamber RNZAF – New Zealand
Flt Lt Hay RAAF – Australia
Plt Off Foxlee RAAF – Australia
FS Simpson RAAF – Australia
Sq Ldr Young RAF – USA
Fg Off MacCauslandRCAF – Canada
Fg Off Wile RCAF – Canada
Sgt Garshowits RCAF -Canada
Dambusters
The Pilots Part II
Sgt Garbas RCAF Canada
Fg Off Urquhart RCAF Canada
Sgt Cottam RCAF Canada
Flt Lt Knight RAAF Australia
Sgt Kellow RAAF Australia
Sgt Sutherland RCAF Canada
Sgt O’Brian RCAF Canada
Flt Lt Shannon RAAF Australia
Fg Off Walker RCAF Canada
Flt Lt McCarthy RCAF USA
Sgt Radcliffe RAF Canada
FS McLean RCAF Canada
Fg Off Rodger RCAF Canada
Sgt Byers RCAF Canada
Sgt McDowell RCAF Canada
Flt Lt Barlow RAAF Australia
Fg Off Williams RAAF Australia
Fg Off Glinz RCAF Canada
Sgt Gowrie RCAF Canada
FS Thrasher RCAF Canada
Flt Lt Munro RNZAF New Zealand
Sgt Pigeon RCAF Canada
FS Weeks RCAF Canada
Plt Officer Howard RAAF Australia
FS Brown RCAF Canada
Sgt Oancia RCAF Canada
Pilot Off Burpee RCAF Canada
Sgt Arthur RCAF Canada
FS Brady RCAF Canada
Also:
“…My 92 year old father was asked to do a photo recon at tree top level to see what was actually there, he took off with a camera
man and a camera in a fast twin engine plane flying up the Ruhr Valley in broad daylight was something the Germans thought the British would be crazy to do as they can see you Dad did it in the afternoon the two turrets on the Moehne dam were in plain site as he passed over the top of them to film he said he made a run for it as he was all alone he went 200 miles east and then 200 miles north and back to England the photos showed a line of trees several days later the 617 Squadron made their run into history.
Dad was with a precision bombing group the #408 Goose Squadron RCAF-Bomber Command #5. He recieved a medal and won the prize for the best recon photos, he said making it back was the prize as his plane was like swiss cheese.”