From Hell's Bloomingdale's, She Stabs At Thee!

New Hampshire-based journalist John Burtis uses his own riff on a Tom Wolfe title to explore “The Bonfire of The Inanities“:

In their Herculean efforts to lend further “gravitas” to the beleaguered story, the media trundled out grizzled hunting experts, college-trained weather men and women, experts on color recognition and the reasons for the use of international orange on hunting outfits, the problems to be encountered from lead poisoning, ornithologists and the year of the expected Texas quail extinction, medical experts and the grave damage to be expected from the horrors of bird shot, cardiologists, Neil Young and the needles and the damage done, schematic diagrams of shooting victims, savvy attorneys to discourse on the legal ramifications of the expected charges for attempted murder and great bodily harm, pettifoggers to discuss the upcoming civil penalties, constitutional scholars to describe this latest nail in the proverbial coffin of impeachment, pundits to describe in glib detail the replacement of Dick Cheney for this strategic gaffe of immense proportions and experts in finer points of haberdashery to explain the meaning of the pink tie – the full list may never be fully tabulated because of its absolutely daunting size and the fact that it was pounded out in 24 news cycles for nearly a week.

The line about “the meaning of the pink tie” is a reference to the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan–the Post’s last line of defense. Givhan is called in whenever the GOP scores an advance: her columns–a combination of Sigmund Freud and Alan Flusser–have ripped apart newly nominated Supreme Court Judges Roberts and Alito, and shortly after the 2004 election, Cheney himself. She’s not so much the Doomsday Machine as a sartorial kamikaze: from Hell’s Bloomingdale’s, she stabs at thee!