Synopses & Reviews
Review
"A hilarious, brilliantly crafted, full-on verbal assault on America's pundit class. Brown shows us just how lazy, stupid, and corrupt almost of all our nation's most beloved columnists have become. I'm now fully convinced that this entire generation of over-published bullshit artists deserve to be tasered in the face, one at a time, preferably on live television."
- Michael Hastings, author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story
Synopsis
A pundit is as a king. America replaces its presidents, its senators, and its generals, but a pundit made is a pundit forever. From this, we may determine either that every American pundit is so deserving of his position in the punditocracy that he ought to hold it forever, or that some pundits are in fact not qualified for their roles but nonetheless remain in place by way of inertia. This state of affairs is either very good or very bad for the public's understanding of crucial issues.
Hot, Fat, and Clouded assumes the latter, and from this position serves as the most damning attack yet written on the failures of the opinion class. Ignoring the nation's more obviously ridiculous media figures, the book concentrates instead on America's "serious" commentators:
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman,
The Washington Post columnists Richard Cohen and Charles Krauthammer, and
The New Republic editor Martin Peretz among others.