Shut Up And Read Me

November 24, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Election 2008, Entertainment, Media, Music, Sarah Palin 

With all the hoopla surrounding the President-elect’s Cabinet and staff choices last week it’s understandable that last Friday’s introduction of a new columnist to the stable of that conservative daily the Washington Times went nearly unnoticed, even though that columnist is also a chart-topping country music star.

Let me guess, says the reader.  It has to be Toby Keith, right? He’s a perfectly natural fit.

No, not Toby – although last night, appearing on Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central holiday special, he sang about the true meaning of Christmas in his trademark red-blooded fashion.  (This clip is of subpar visual quality but contains the entire song.)

Not Toby?  Well, it’s got to be Lee Greenwood, then.

No, not Lee.

Bocephus?

No.

How about Darryl Worley of “Have You Forgotten” fame? Or maybe Aaron Tippin?

Neither of them.  It’s Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Mary Chapin Carpenter? As in the Ivy League graduate and frequent 1990s hitmaker who defended the Dixie Chicks, both in interviews and in a song, earlier this decade after they drew controversy for attacking George W. Bush on stage?

Yes, it’s her byline on the column which, according to the Times, will run every other Friday in the paper’s entertainment section.  The debut column touts the virtues of a new group, Hem, and opens with Ms. Carpenter explaining that she’s spent much of this fall glued to political coverage on TV at her Charlottesville home, with the suggestion that this has cut into her songwriting time.  (In recent years the performer has battled depression and the effects of a pulmonary embolism, and has released just two albums since 2000.)  She does not specify for whom she voted earlier this month, but since the column finishes with a lengthy quote from one of then-Sen. Obama’s campaign speeches, I’m willing to guess that packets of Governor Sarah’s Five-Alarm Moose Chili Mix are not in her pantry.

And so Donna Brazile has some company among the Times’s liberal pundits.  I have to wonder if the paper, after a few months of a thoroughly liberal Obama presidency, might be up for signing on Victoria Jackson, the former Saturday Night Live regular who called the then-candidate a “Communist” just before Election Day on Bill O’Reilly’s show.  Or bringing Hank Jr. aboard – football season’s winding down, after all.

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