Kitty Litter

I was going to ignore Kitty Parker's column about the pernicious influence of blogs. Parker is, after all, the columnist who quoted with approval a friend who advocated the assassination the 2004 Democratic Presidential primary candidates, and then attempted to cover up the quote and lie to her readers about it. So she should know about integrity and accountability.

The column is so vague as to be meaningless, and was no doubt phoned in weeks ago so Kitty could take another week's vacation at year end.

But I was curious about Kitty's own cred. Turns out she works as a flunky for the Buckleys, at something called the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Inbreeding. The mission of the school can be gleaned from the dribblings of its senile founder, Reid Buckley:

Have you ever grieved to see decent, gifted, hard-working people humiliated in public by jackasses? Have you been one of them?

In 1984, a toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India killed nearly 3000 [sic] people. The tragedy was terrible. So was the seeming incompetence of so many high Union Carbide functionaries, who where [sic - so much for standards] paraded before the camera. They appeared never to be able to get their stories straight.

As Reid Buckley watched these decent men squirm and fumble, he thought how unnecessary that humiliation was. He began testing a workshop to teach executives how to express themselves with poise under duress. The result four years later was the opening of the Buckley School.

Pity the poor executives, whose humiliation was at least as tragic to Reid as the asphyxiation, blindness and sudden death of thousands of Indians exposed to clouds of deadly poison in their own homes. And to be humiliated by poor, non-Anglo, non-Christian corpses, no less. I guess Kitty considers helping corporate killers get their stories straight to be of more value to society than blogging.