MRC’s Geoff Dickens discovered that NBC’s Today brought on “deadline poet” Calvin Trillin and giggled over his “hilarious” book of Bush-bashing verse titled A Heckuva Job. The only thing missing was any description of who Trillin was composing the poetry for: the leftist teeth-gnashers at The Nation. This was nowhere near as explicit a Nation plug on NBC as Katie Couric announcing back in the 1990s that the mag has “always been a platform for speakers who have been ahead of their time.”
Perhaps he was recommended by old NBC hand Al Franken (Trillin just did his Air America radio show on June 8, also known as Ding Dong Zarqawi’s Dead Day.) Trillin insisted that “heckuva job, Brownie” is somehow a quotation for the ages: “I think it’s gonna stick with him in the way that, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ has stuck with Franklin D. Roosevelt.”Equal time for W.H. von Dreele?