Life Imitates Pauline Kael

Zev Chafets of The New York Daily News recently wrote:

In 1972, The New Yorker’s movie critic, Pauline Kael, won herself a place in political lore by expressing astonishment at the Republicans’ 49-state landslide victory. “How could that be?” she demanded. “I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.”

(To be fair, Kael could be extremely perceptive when she wanted to be–she was among the first to expose Michael Moore’s fictions in Roger & Me.)

Flashforward to today, where ABC’s The Note political blog–which wisely declared its own bias earlier this year–has this classic:

we still can’t find a single American who voted for Al Gore in 2000 who is planning to vote for George Bush in 2004. (If you are that elusive figure, e-mail us and tell us who you are and why: [email protected].)

As Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes:

Time to get out of that newsroom, Noters. Does the name Zell Miller ring any bells? How about Roger L. Simon? Ed Koch…James Woods, Gary Oldman, Dennis Miller, and Dennis Hopper; I’d be surprised if Ron Silver didn’t vote for Gore as well. But hey, nobody’s ever heard of them, right?

NRO’s “Kerry Spot” has some thoughts and a stuffed inbox of converted Gore 2000 voters, and another name: Ron Kessler, an author who voted for Gore before writing a recently released analysis of President Bush.

Update: Charles Johnson (whom I wouldn’t be at all suprised to hear was a Gore voter himself in 2000) is inviting his nearly one million monthly visitors to email The Note. It will be fun to see if they run any sort of apology or just bury the story.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in January, somehow, the left seems to think that 9/11 didn’t happen–or they think it wasn’t that big a deal. And a post like this by The Note just confirms it.

Update (5/05/05): Welcome National Review Online’s “TKS” readers! Please look around; there’s lots of content here, including offsite links to some of our longer articles and essays.