I read this passage this morning on the train into work and though of you Mr Greenwald. From "Point to Point Navigation" by Gore Vidal, Chapter 47, page 233 from the paperback edition:

A clumsy journalist at Time magazine some years ago did a cover story on me which was odd. It was at the time of Nixon's fall and since the piece was about my novel 1876 and some of the not always sterling truths that our founders were capable of, the essay on me was entitled "The Sins of the Fathers," a standard propagandist erasure of the news the publisher does not want taken too seriously: sometimes known as "they all do it," so what's the fuss? Currently, to counteract all the talk of stolen elections in 2000 and 2004 a dozen journalists now assure us that our elections have always been corrupt; which is hardly true. Recently the same Time magazine journalist felt it was time that I be discredited as vain and self-absorbed. So he wrote as if he had actually been inside my study which he hasn't and saw hundreds of blue leather-bound books all by me. But they are mostly worn leather-bound reference books of the sort I doubt that this kind of journalist consults. But then more than ever in my lifetime the great whopping lie is seriously in vogue.

I could only find this article on time.com containing the phrase "sins of the fathers", and there is no "by-line": http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,918135,00.html

Perhaps someone can research this better than I. But Vidal calls Time out as early as 1976, and I suspect that he would certainly agree that even that is not the beginning of the magazine's downturn.

I'll vote for whichever piece of trash will get the Presidential election reduced to 8 weeks and mandate that all elections and campaigns be publicly funded.

Polls are liars' math.

Someone going by the moniker "virtue[insert any string here]" who routinely counters any argument with "pathetic" and nothing else is, by definition, anything but virtuous.

Perhaps AdHominem001 would be more suitable.

I'm reluctant to give much credence to any "wiki" trotted out in the name of "truth in media" by one who believes we are winning in Iraq and that the Economy is Great(tm).

You can put that in your pipe and smoke it, Shooter.

Joan, you meant to type "freeDUMB requires religion."

Silver medal in tonight's race for the Worst Person in the Woooooooooorrrrrrrrrrlllllllllddddddd!

Very well written, insightful review. The listener in the United States often ignores or disregards the circumstances from which arose their particular scene or sound, or worse romanticizes it. That said, I would have not associated Oasis and Blair, My Bloody Valentine and Thatcher (not that way that I *do* associate Elvis Costello with Thatcher, Joy Division and the Clash with their working-class Albion roots, etc). In fact, Britpop is seemingly so generic and out-of-time by design.

This of course all begs the question as to whether I plan on buying the box set. Being an avowed Anglophile, I like if not love many of the bands on this collection; but being a music fan, the level of filler and crap would be an affront to my tastes. Its just this sort of thing that the recording industry does that in my mind gives the music fan implicit permission to share and steal music, to wit, the industry saying, "well, fuck the fans." Fuck you too!