Newspaper columnist and television political pundit Bob Novak died today at age 78. He was known to be in very bad health for months now. I can still recall my first exposure to Novak, watching him in college on such shows as CNN's Crossfire. He used to absolutely enrage me. Novak often came across as a completely cold fish, and he was a rabid conservative. Neither then, nor in later years, did I ever care too much for Bob Novak the TV talking head (although he was often good for a big laugh due to some of the over-the-top things he would say). But it wasn't really until after the start of the Internet era that I was able to actually read Novak's newspaper columns in the Chicago Sun-Times. They were exceptional. Novak spent little time in his columns ranting about his far right world view. Rather, the central focus of his columns was always the inner workings of Washington (both sides of the aisle). And he had a lot of sources that he had accumulated over a long journalistic career that stretched back to before the JFK years. I can't think of any other column now or in the past that did quite what Novak's column did and did it so well. Since his health turned and he stopped writing any columns late last year, I've very much missed the insight he always brought to what was really going on in Washington. He will be missed, at least by me.
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