After a bitter quarrel, some resentment must remain.

What can one do about it?

Therefore the sage, keeps his half of the bargain.

But does not exact his due

A man of virtue performs his part.

But a man without virtue requires others to fulfill their obligations.

The Tao of heaven is impartial

It stays with good men all the time.

Tao Te Ching (Ch-79)

Praising the evil man upon his death does a disservice to the hero when he dies.

dickday (Ch-2)

I.F. Stone was a great journalist and a great American. He died in 1989 at the age of 81.

He was a little harsh on my friend Socrates, but what the hell. The man fought for the poor, for Civil Rights and against unnecessary wars his entire life. Naturally if you took these stances in the 20th century, you were labeled a communist. J. Edgar was after Stone till the end of Hoover's tenure as head of the secret police in this country. Never found one bit of evidence demonstrating Stone was anything but a fine American and a fine Journalist.  Believe me if 'they' had found something, Stone would have been imprisoned in a flash.

As far as fighting the good fight Stone once said:

"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing - for the sheer fun and joy of it - to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it." http://thinkexist.com/quotation/the-only-kinds-of-fights-worth-fighting-are-those/347064.html

If God, as some now say, is dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem."

"Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie."

"Rich people march on Washington every day.

"The only thing God didn't do to Job was give him a computer.

This was my type of guy. I mean I know that the rich DO march on Washington every day.  And they receive a lot more recognition from our lawmakers, do they not?  And his discussion of the good fight. Pretty applicable to the health care issues right now?

I watched Robert Novak lie to the American People for forty years. Screw poor people. The rich are not the problem, the government is. His entire life was dedicated to misdirection, obfuscation and out and out lies.

He spent much time, EVEN AFTER STONE'S DEATH, perpetrating the myth that Stone was a commie spy. No kidding. As Erick Alterman puts it:

Stone died in 1989 at age 81, but the smear never has. The leaders of this campaign have been the professionally paranoid red-hunter Herbert Romerstein, the comically misnamed "Accuracy in Media," wind-up shrieking doll Ann Coulter and, most tellingly, Robert Novak. The last is, of course, both a respected member of the Washington journalistic establishment and, as everyone who has followed the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame case is well aware, a man who will give away national security secrets to America's enemies when it suits his own ideological purposes.

Novak has been peddling the phony Stone story for more than a decade now. When I appeared on CNN's Crossfire with him fourteen years ago, he raised it in order to smear my work and my reputation (Stone was my friend and journalistic mentor during his last decade). Following the show, I wrote a letter to then-CNN president Tom Johnson asking for the record to be corrected but received no response. I've tried a few more times to force the issue with Novak, but he has run away from every appearance. And the slander continues. When John Edwards spoke of Stone's Trial of Socrates during the 2004 presidential campaign, Novak fulminated on CNN that this was an outrage, as "Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin." Again, CNN did not bother with a rebuttal, much less a correction.

There was meanness and toughness in Novak's work and in his personal style, and depending on your sensibilities, this cruelty either drew you to the man or repulsed you. Novak didn't have a chip on his shoulder--he was all chip, as willing to shred his friends as he was his enemies: He's the sort of guy who would have been perfect to teach anger-mismanagement classes. He famously decked a much younger heckler in 2004, he picked fights with the left by calling I.F. Stone a communist spy, and he earned the label "douche bag of liberty" from Jon Stewart for his coverage of the Swift Boaters' critique of John Kerry.   http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/29938.html

So go ahead and slam me for attacking the dead; but it is in the finest tradition of  Robert Novak.

This son of a bitch perpetrated nothing but right wing vomit and he even aided the 'Swift Boaters' in their smear campaign against Kerry. http://townhall.com/columnists/RobertNovak/2004/08/27/swift_boat_interview?page=full&comments=true

It is up to the government to keep the government's secrets.  So Stone was selling secrets to the commies but Novak was only outing a CIA operative because like the moon to NASA, the info was there for his column. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/robert_novak.html

As David Margolick wrote in Vanity Fair four years ago, there's no danger that anybody will ever publish an anthology of Novak's work.

The Novak scowl wasn't an act. He truly didn't care what people said about him. Even in death, this last of the breed is impervious to his critics. http://www.slate.com/id/2225617/

Novak describes his friendship with Ian Smith, the former prime minister of Rhodesia. He admired Smith largely because white-ruled Rhodesia blocked Soviet-supported Marxists from getting a larger foothold in Southern Africa.  Of course, all of this came to end after Smith caved in to pressure by the British and U.S. governments and extended the vote to Rhodesia's majority of uneducated blacks. What happened, in Novak's view, was a foreign policy failure of the Carter administration.

Listen folks, the younger will forget, but anytime anyone wished to attack foreign racist pricks, they were simply advancing the cause of communism.

Yeah, but Robert Novak became a pinnacle of Civil Rights we are to believe from his own column:

"Well into the 1970s and beyond as I pondered this incident, I saw it as helping me understand that Martin Luther King was a mythic figure for blacks. His professional, political, and personal shortcomings were subsumed in his ascension as symbolic leader of African-Americans, who demanded and deserved a national holiday for him. The people who opposed it, including me, were wrong."

But I found an interesting take on this statement by a fascist blogger:

This, of course, ignores accumulating evidence that educrats are using Martin Luther King Day as a vehicle for anti-white brainwashing.  And in fact this about-face on King by Novak and other conservatives has less to do with principle than a desire to avoid being labeled a "racist" for standing firm in pointing out his peccadilloes, plagiarism, and pro-Communist affiliations. Even if King has become a "mythic figure" for his ethnic constituents, does this mean conservatives should silence any criticism?

Sometimes, the right wingers can help us out in our search for the truth of things. Even this Nazi knew Novak's adherance to Civil Rights was a ruse.

Almost every single obit has to include this:

Media Matters for America reported that, on August 4, 2005, Novak "stormed off CNN's set after using vulgar language during a live discussion with CNN contributor James Carville on the Strategy Session segment of the August 4 edition of CNN's Inside Politics.

Frankly I don't care about this incident at all.

The fact is that Novak spent his entire life fighting for the cause of the rich over the poor, the cause of the powerful over the powerless,  the cause of the evil perpetrators against the victims.

REST IN PIECES, Robert Novak. I aint gonna miss ya at all.