ROY EDROSO

Headless Columnist on Prizeless Pic

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post has never been a favorite of the Pulitzer Prize people, for obvious reasons. Still, the Posties, being newspaper folk with the attendant sentimentalities, tend not to grouse in print about journalism's most sacred laurels.

But on April 9, Post columnist Andrea Peyser had something to say about this year's Pulitzers:

"The Pulitzer committee yesterday told the City of New York, our selfless firefighters, 3000 victims of this nation's bloodiest terror attack, and the American flag to go to hell."

This despicable act of treason turns out to be the awarding of the Breaking News Photography Pulitzer to the "dependably politically correct" New York Times for its September 11 coverage--when, as Peyser and patriots know, the prize by right belongs to Thomas Franklin of theRecord of Hackensack, New Jersey, for his pic of firemen raising the flag at Ground Zero.

"Was it the American flag that spooked the current gaggle of Pulitzer committee members?" demands Peyser. "Or was it that the firemen were all white guys?"

Peyser's racial crack perhaps helps to explain this spasm of rage. Last month, Post columnists and other conservative commentators found much to criticize in the recent, African-American-intensive Oscars. At a time when, regarding the war, most media outlets seem to be reading from conservative cue cards, it may gall these folks when well-known award-givers fail to get with the program, celebrating instead dependably politically correct newspapers and black people.

It should be mentioned that the staff of the Wall Street Journal, not dependably politically correct (and including the right-wing "Wonder Land" columnist Daniel Henninger), won this year's Breaking News Reporting Pulitzer for their September 11 coverage.

The Dream Life of Jim Lileks

Why then Ile fit you. Jimbo's mad againe! Blogger and war enthusiast Jim Lileks is concerned for his 20-month-old daughter. The cause of his concern is not childhood illness, or even fluoridated water. It's Saddam Hussein. (Lileks and his family live in Minnesota.)

Some months back, in his "Bleat" section, Lileks imagined his daughter killed by Bin Laden, and himself taking revenge. ("Give me a gun; show me the cave.") Later, he imagined her torn from his tender embrace by a feminazi, and himself taking revenge. ("To the moon, Alice. Bang. Zoom.")

Now, he imagines the poor girl recruited as a suicide bomber by Al-Aqsa, with "one of Saddam's men" later coming to the home of the surviving Lileks' "with a check to buy us off," and himself...aw, let Jimbo tell it: "I would kick his body over until his face is in the dirt and shove the check in the hole in the back of his head."

From the evidence of his war-unrelated Bleats, Lileks is a wonderful father who--like all such, I'm sure--performs countless small acts of heroism every day for the cause of his daughter's welfare. I'm sure she'll be fine. Dad I'm not so sure about.