The Sentinel of Xanadu

This is the first piece in an ongoing EtD feature I'm going to call "Object of Ridicule and Scorn." Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is Helen Thomas, a partisan windbag with clear opinions. You'd think she’d be my type of writer. Sadly, she has eschewed coherence at virtually every turn. So in an homage to the late, great baseball blog “Fire Joe Morgan,” I’m going to mercilessly parse her latest column, entitled “An Eloquent Defense of American Democracy.”

AN ELOQUENT DEFENSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by Helen Thomas

I know this is going to be fun because, as any grade schooler with a civics class under his belt could tell you, there is no such thing as an American democracy, and for good reason. Now, I understand that for whatever reason, democracy has a leg up on representative republicanism in the P.R. department (I’ll leave you to meditate privately as to why), but the disparities between the two are not trivial, particularly when one uses the specifics of the definition to make a political argument. It’s not without condescending bemusement that I ponder how both Helen Thomas and Barack Obama—to whose speech Ms. Thomas’ title refers—managed to elude this very basic premise of American governance.