The Station of The Cross

Amazing. James Wolcott reports on another CNN photo montage celebrating another one of its news personalities, Robert Novak:

The Capital Gang went full metal Catholic in this week's edition, using the Pope's death as an altar to celebrate Novak's Catholic conversion as the fellow panelists reminisced about the great day he received his first communion. The centerpiece of the show was a segment devoted to Novak's embrace of the cross, tracing his spiritual development through a visual montage that showed a young Jewish boy from the Midwest evolving into a political reporter aging into a smug man in a banker's vest staring thoughtfully at church statuary and appearing on Crossfire with ashes smudged on his angry brow. He was even interviewed by Judy Woodruff (Hunt's wife) about his newfound faith! It was bad enough when pundits started fancying themselves as political players, now we're supposed to take them seriously as religious pilgrims too. (The only portion of the show that rang metaphorically true were the glimpses of Novak walking down the aisle between rows of empty pews, because the arid, conservative, high-horse Catholicism that he and O'Beirne espouse is doomed to play to empty houses.)

I wonder which Bob Seger song this asshole flashback was set to.