Daddy's Little Helper

By Cernig

Congratulations to J-Pod for picking up the editorship of the neocon four-color comic Commentary.

Here at The Newshoggers, we don't for one moment believe the choice of John as editor has anything to do with his daddy, Norman, being "editor-at-large" in his spare time from his primary role as WormTongue-In-Chief for Rudy Gulliani.

We're sure that Daddy will keep lightweight - as opposed to bantam-weight John - thinkers from overshadowing poor John's ego, as happened at the Weekly Standard where Kristol and Barned managed to drive poor co-founder J-Pod out with their limelight-hogging.

We're also certain that John's experience as the Weekly Standard's movie critic and his time at NRO, where he regularly tackled such pressing issues as American Idol and Battlestar Galictica, will stand him in good stead for sending his own father's work to press with a gold star in the top Right corner.

We think everyone should ignore New York Magazine's Hannah Rosin, who once worked alongside John:

When he worked at the conservative Washington Times, the joke goes, people thought his name was “John P. Normanson,” because the paper’s editor, Arnaud de Borchgrave, a friend of his parents’, walked around the office introducing him as John Podhoretz, Norman’s son.

...John Podhoretz has inherited his father’s literary narcissism, but without the ideological vigor. Instead, he decided early on his model would be Robert Warshow, a movie reviewer for Commentary in the fifties. “The rest of us were interested in boring topics, like foreign policy,” says his friend Daniel Cass. “John only wanted to talk about movies and television.”

So his parents spent their life at war with Communism; the younger Podhoretz has spent much of his life at war with sitcoms.

For five years on and off, Podhoretz wrote a column for the conservative Moonie-owned newspaper the Washington Times, in which he lived out the banal life of a twentysomething on the page -- one of America’s first bathetic, solipsistic Gen-Xers (around the Washington Times offices, the column was often read out loud in Podhoretz’s absence, for comic value, in a ritual famously called Podenfreude).

And we definitely intend to ignore professor of both English and Journalism Eric Altermann, who wrote about John's work for Murdoch and the Rev. Moon:

The John (son of Norman) Podhoretz story...illustrates another truth about contemporary right-wing journalism. All of the writers who worship at the shrine of the free market would be lost if any of them were ever forced to earn their living working in it. [He] has spent virtually his entire life supping at the table of strange right-winger foreigners seeking to buy their way into respectability by courting the American right.

Indeed, we can only heartedly endorse Roger Ailes ringing approval today, as he repeats something I'm sure J-Pod would wish us all to hold strong to - "Thank God We Live In A Meritocracy".