I’m tired. I’m cranky. I’m about ready for 2009 to be over, and then I come across this nonsense at Huffington Post:

Two Black Role Models Done In By Hubris
In the past few weeks, the two most famous and arguably most successful black men in America have taken a huge fall. It has become clear that both pro golfer Tiger Woods, just named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press, and the American president, Barack Obama, the first black person to lead the country, suffer from a surfeit of hubris which has finally caught up with them. If both men somehow thought they were untouchable, they have been put to right. Both have crashed to earth and it may well be true that they can never recover their earlier status again.

Two Black Role Models Done In By Hubris

by Some Idiot On The Internet (aka Lisa Solod Warren)

In the past few weeks, the two most famous and arguably most successful black men in America have taken a huge fall. It has become clear that both pro golfer Tiger Woods, just named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press, and the American president, Barack Obama, the first black person to lead the country, suffer from a surfeit of hubris which has finally caught up with them. If both men somehow thought they were untouchable, they have been put to right. Both have crashed to earth and it may well be true that they can never recover their earlier status again.

While Woods’ “indiscretions” affect only himself and his family, he has felt the sting of the media invasion and a permanent loss of privacy. His reputation as sport’s good family guy is gone. For Barack Obama the honeymoon is really over, even those who wanted to give him a chance are getting tired of what is not getting done, what was promised and reneged on. There is disappointment enough in both of them.

(Update 6:44pm ET: Steven Walling in the comments reminded me about the rel=nofollow attribute, so I’ve linked to the stupid p.o.s. article now. Thanks Steven.)

I will not link to it. To read the full thing, you can head over to huffpo directly. Linking is an endorsement in this digital age and drives up the search ranking. I will not reward Huffington Post for this. Suffice it to say that the rest of the piece is as full of mismatched analogies and cloudy-eyed analysis as the headline and opening paragraphs.

Already confident in my assessment that this piece was garbage, my next thought was, “Who in the hell is Lisa Solod Warren???” According to her bio on the site:

Lisa Solod Warren is a former newspaper and magazine journalist who now writes fiction and essays and blogs at blogcritics.com and redroom.com. She is the author of Desire: Women Write About Wanting (Seal Press, 2007) and can be visited at www.lisasolodwarren.com.

First of all, she’s not the author of that book. She’s the editor, which means she selected what goes inside. And in the limited writing she contributed to the book, Publisher’s Weekly says she failed:
Warren’s introduction lacks the crucial assessment of the commonplace notion that women are trained to ignore or subvert desire. Despite leaving unexamined her conclusion that the range of desires expressed in this collection is “just skimming the surface,” Warren has collected an enjoyable and thought-provoking variety of essays.
How is she qualified to assess the performance of both the president of the United States and Tiger Woods as black men and link them together, when she can’t even assess the meaning of the essays she hand-picked for her writing collection???!!! This idiot should stick to writing what is certainly shitty fiction.

Now I’m mad.

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