Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories
In reading Black’s staunchest media allies you get the feeling they’re still fighting the last battle, while the war has moved on in, how to say, rather a new direction. Take Barbara Shecter’s piece in this morning’s National Post cataloguing the corporate collapse of Hollinger since the investigation, indictment, trial and conviction of its founder. We learn that the Warhol is in storage—the subject of an ongoing legal wrangle—and that if the company continues to burn cash by paying everybody’s legal fees, the cupboard will soon be bare. We hear a shareholder lamenting this in an it’s-all-so-unnecessary tone that suggests everyone’s missed the “real” crime here. Finally, we’re told, “Lord Black has publicly lamented conditions at the company. Last year, when Hollinger Inc. sold the company’s landmark headquarters, he said he hoped the proceeds would help keep the company afloat ‘long enough for us to start to restore the business.’ That prospect grew dimmer with his convictions in a Chicago courtroom a couple of weeks ago.”
Grew dimmer? That’s like saying Japan’s prospects of winning the war “grew dimmer” after Hiroshima. The underlying idea that somehow Black is still in a position to make a fight of it is completely nuts and, to stretch an analogy, reminds me of those Japanese soldiers they found in caves thinking they were still part of some rearguard guerrilla movement. Even Black himself must blush at this sort of lunacy. Further to the same point, we find Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of the American conservative mag National Review, writing on their Web site today:
“I, for one, am rooting for Black to beat these raps, and to emerge again as the media leader—“press baron”—he is. I believe he has done a lot of good in the world; I look forward to his doing more. He understands the worth of Western civilization, and he understands the many threats against it, both within and without. I regret not having had the opportunity to work for him.”
I repeat: he wrote that today. The war is over, long live the war!
A name among millions, &c. [National Review]Image, empire left in limbo [National Post]
