Over at the New Republic’s lead blog “The Plank,” Jason Zengerle makes mincemeat of Tom Brokow’s tribute to Tim Russert in the NYT (Yes, this is awfully inside, but it’s the Internet, damn it! It’s supposed to be inside!)
Zengerle’s takedown needs to be read in full, but the essence is that Tim and Tom had a catchphrase for a politician who had left the common folk behind—“He doesn’t wear socks!—meaning that the dude had gone Nantucket, affecting the leisured preppie habit of not wearing socks with loafers in the summertime. The only problem with the gag: Zengerle gives us a shot of Russert summering in Nantucket sans socks. But I guess the line only applies to politicians, not the guys who get paid twenty times as much to make fun of them.
