John Goodman, founder and well-paid head of the Dallas-based think tank National Center for Public Analysis, takes it in the shorts on The Nation's Web site. Where to begin. The headline? "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." The lead? Katrina vanden Heuvel (which has to be a fake name) writes, "Political corruption, the world's second oldest profession, just isn't as easy as it used to be." Or how about this:
"[Goodman] thought he had bought himself another reliable intellectual to shill for George W., but what he ended up with in Bruce Bartlett, the author of Imposter: How George Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, was a pundit with a guilty conscious and a leaky mouth."
The writer also dismisses the NCPA as a "third-rate think tank," which is unfair--everyone I talked to for my story said it was at least second-rate. --Robert Wilonsky