Everybody Hates Tom

Actually I think Fitzmorris is well entitled to his opinion of Vietnamese food even though I and, I guess a lot of people, tend to disagree with it. A better criticism would revolve around just how honest the process by which that opinion is formulated is. Ask yourself if Tom would be more enthusiastic about Vietnamese food if more of those style restaurants sponsored his radio show.

Yesterday Matt Taibbi wrote a scathing critique of the attitude CBS' Lara Logan and other establishment media figures have adopted in reaction to the Gen. McChrystal Bud Light Lime affair. As with everything Taibbi writes, there are numerous quoteworthy passages but I think this sums it up best.

As to this whole "unspoken agreement" business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she's like pretty much every other "reputable" journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she's supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you're covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard?

And that's often my biggest beef with Tom Fitzmorris.

Update, clarification and a little backtracking: Oyster comments:

Holy smokes! What an embarrassing food thread. There's a dozen or so commenters who conflate an opinion about limited MENUS at Vietnamese restaurants with a complaint about Vietnamese CUISINE itself, just so they can rag on Fitzmorris.
Fitz's stuffy reply does him few favors, but he's essentially correct: the author and commenters under a post titled "Missing the Point"... missed the point.

Yes that's all true and I should have said so. I think Tom actually conflates the point himself though in this paragraph

I read an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago about the resurgence of the New Orleans restaurant scene. I was astonished by the writer’s ten best places to dine in New Orleans. In it were three Vietnamese restaurants, all of them pho and banh-mi shops. What? Did he talk with anybody here over the age of thirty, living outside the Marigny and Bywater? To read the article, you’d think pho were more important to the local eating scheme than gumbo is.

Of course I very much like the line where Tom says "Did he talk with anybody here over the age of thirty, living outside the Marigny and Bywater?" and could talk about that all day but it's incidental to the point here. What he does wrong is he starts by making the point that the NYT reviewer assigned too much importance to what Tom considers the wrong Vietnamese joints but finishes by saying something that can be read as disdain for the cuisine's importance as a whole. Thus the indignant piling on.

Anyway I was in a hurry to get to the important point about Fitzmorris that isn't made often enough. He tends to shill as much as he critiques and never establishes a clear enough line between those activities. That, more than his "stuffy" style (which I actually like) is a better reason to pile on.