[img]1|left|Ari Noonan ||no_popup[/img]Digesting Timmy Rutten’s book reviews in the Los Angeles Times is like buying your lunch-hour tuna sandwich every day at the same deli: No drama. Years in advance, you know within two taste buds exactly how the tuna will strike your palate.
As a politically risk-averse reviewer, Mr. Rutten is more predictable, and at least as dull, as my second wife.
Fierce with unquenchable anger, by fascinating juxtaposition, he is a drab gray, standard-issue left winger, as intriguing as an emptied box of stale cereal. He writes exactly what he is told, loyally lauding liberals and reliably ridiculing non-liberals.
Devoid of imagination, insight, flexibility or a stitch of analytical skill, reading his reviews is like taking the same 7-block drive to the marble-making factory every morning for 49 years.
Even the perfume-free unshaven bums who sleep in the doorways of 2nd and Spring every night can forecast the outcome of a Rutten book review with greater precision than Al Gore estimates the root causes of manmade global warming.
Mr. Rutten did not have to wait for Karl Rove’s new book, “Courage and Consequence, My Life as a Conservative,” (Threshold Editions), for the every-paragraph snickering to begin.
Mr. Rutten’s reviews are a textbook explanation of why modern liberals widely have been unable to sustain themselves in power. Their bands play the same one critical note every night. Whether it is closing down Gitmo, advocating healthcare reform, scorning defrocked (and now former) New York Congressman Eric Massa or reviewing a memoir by President Bush’s principal deputy, the language and the unbridled fury never vary.
Please Give Us a Challenge
His intellectual footsteps are so light that he fails to leave a print, even in muddy ground.
A painstakingly scrupulous master of pettiness, it is a tribute to Mr. Rutten’s penchant for thoroughness that he confines his broken-glass criticism to Mr. Rove’s political statements.
Yes, Mr. Rove wrote a 600-page book, but Mr. Rutten ignores that invisible detail.
Like a deaf mute stranded at the far end of the Holland Tunnel, Mr. Rutten only addresses Mr. Rove’s ideological statements, which is like evaluating the underside of the toenail on the big toe of the right foot of a beauty queen, ignoring the rest of her.
I hope Mr. Rutten does not have progeny. In the sad event he does, I am confident that given his tendency for extreme behavior, he alternately wallops the kids int dazed submission and pats them on their shaved heads with his double-gloved hand.
How the gentleman mysteriously retains his job is a question I will pose in heaven after I die.
Whether Mr. Rutten read Mr. Rove’s book or borrowed someone else’s review, here is his amazing final score:
23 to Nothing
Bitterly, perhaps enviably, he issues 23 scorching, lip-smacking criticisms of Mr. Rove.
He failed to find even one laudable act or conclusion among the 600 pages. As a Jew, I could find many more than that in the Koran.
All I know about the book after inspecting Mr. Rutten’s style-starved fingertip review is that in 23 places he passionately disagrees with him ideologically.
If Mr. Rutten’s overspilling girth were as slender as his cerebrally slim reviews, he would not have to huff when he walks up even one step and I would not have to consult somebody else’s Rove review.
Before going away this afternoon, besides numerous misrepresentations and exaggerations by the reviewer, permit me to cite a single sample of Mr. Rutten’s incurious, juvenile approach to book assessment.
Predictably, Mr. Rutten lambasts Mr. Rove for championing a terrorist prisoner treatment policy that the reviewer arguably labels torture.
That is fair.
But, please, Timmy Baby, try to penetrate Mr. Rove’s far more complex reasoning.
Explain to us hungry readers why you and he disagree. That could be compelling. Instead, the reviewer , colorlessly strikes the author over the head with a baseball bat, cleverly calling out, “Take that, take that.”
Sadly, it seems beyond the ken of left wing book reviewers to include the “why” of disagreement with conservative authors. That could be enlightening. Instead, they repeatedly launch a new whack attack in nearly every paragraph.
