BYRON YORK MISQUOTES ME.. And this, after I sat next to him all morning. I didn't, to be fair, recognize him till the session's end. I'd never seen York, and wasn't alerted to his famous bouffant ahead of time, so I hadn't known I was brushing such famous knees until I happened to catch sight of his nametag towards the morning's close. At which point, we had a real moment: "We're gonna give you some color," I laughed. He sort of grunted in reply. Sort of. The session was a CAP-run workshop on how to best comport yourself in front of television cameras. They spent an hour or so explaining how to sit, how to speak, how to stay on message, and then had folks cycle through a mock interview which was then replayed on a projector and critiqued by the instructor's. I've been doing a fair amount of TV and radio these days, so I volunteered for the public interrogation. My topic? Health care. I am, after all, here in Vegas to participate on a health care panel. My performance was brilliant, transcendent, inspiring. What a shame I hadn't stolen the tape! When the politely hostile host challenged that I was advocating socialism (in that interview, unlike in my writings, I'd advocated no such thing), I saw no reason to fight. It was just a training session, right? "We should stop running from that moniker," I chuckled. "If we're going to call what Canada, France, Germany, England, Japan, and essentially every -- actually, not essentially, just every -- other industrialized nation offers socialized health care, but they cover all of their citizens with better outcomes and lower costs than we do, then I'm happy to associate myself with that." It was glorious, and I'm only slightly paraphrasing -- at least I remember the "essentially" correction. So imagine my relief to see it on The National Review's website:
