He died last night at age 92. Here’s the CBS obit.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Good lord, these people are nuts.
President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.
This really is a full service blog.
Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.
“I was told there would be no fact checking.”
White supremacy is terrorism.
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”
Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?
When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.
“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”
I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.
This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.
Fight them, without becoming them!
Everybody saw this coming.
Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.
Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.
Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.
This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.
Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?
The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.
There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.
Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.
Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.
Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.
El Cid
Ever notice…? You know what I hate?…
WereBear
Not many could turn whining into an art form.
JGabriel
Andy Rooney’s last words, allegedly spoken five minutes after he died, were, “You know what else I hate? Being dead. God, it’s worse than modern art and all that rock and hippity hop music kids listen to today!”
(Repost from last thread to more appropriate place.)
.
RosiesDad
He was a curmudgeon but he was our curmudgeon. I miss him already.
Andy, this one’s for you…..GO GIANTS!
JGabriel
@WereBear:
Outside of 13 year olds.
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JPL
RIP Andy.
I didn’t know Andy and stopped paying attention to him after several inappropriate comments. Hopefully he mellowed over time.
Yevgraf
Fuck him. He was part of the culture of overpaid perpetual punditry without expertise or learned facts, and was part of the class that felt entitled to a huge platform to opine to the world at large for several decades.
We need to drop those guys like they’re a psycho girlfriend, and deifying and memorializing them is just wrong.
PeakVT
Rooney wasn’t a whiner so much as that uncle who is always complaining, even at the Thanksgiving Day table. He’s right a lot of the time, but you still want him to shut up and go away.
c u n d gulag
I missed Andy since he left a few weeks ago. But I held out hope he might pop-up to comment once in awhile. That’s not to be – sad.
And sure, he made some mistakes – which of us hasn’t?
I thought he was great!
RIP, America’s Favorite Curmudgeon.
I’m calling CBS about the job opening on Monday.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Yevgraf: You are a total fucking asshole.
arguingwithsignposts
“Mainly, his essays struck a cord in viewers …”
You know what I hate? writers who can’t be bothered to check the spelling of their idioms.
RIP
Cheap Jim
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Maybe, but he’s right.
geg6
I always had a soft spot for Andy Rooney because my dad did. He met him once during WWII when Andy was a reporter for Stars and Stripes. He was interviewing Yanks stationed in England and went out with them to a pub for some pints afterward. Said he was a really good guy and very funny, even back then before he was famous. Many years later, when he became famous, my dad wrote him a letter congratulating him and Andy wrote back saying he remembered him and his buddies from that night and how all the Brit girls in the pub were crawling all over my dad because he was so good looking and was the son of two expatriate Brits. Thought that was pretty cool of him.
Kyle Hitler
RIP Andy, one of the last of the old school liberals. Man practically had trilobite fossils on his legs, but his heart was always in the right place. And the way he wasn’t always P.C. was a plus. On his last day he could have chewed some of you punks for breakfast and shat you out before lunch, bones and all.
jonas
@Yevgraf: I don’t know if this is fair. Whether one found his schtick on 60 Minutes charming or annoying, unlike many of today’s so-called pundits, Rooney actually earned his chops being a real reporter — covering the military, IIRC, and doing, you know, actual journalism.
Keith
Can’t say I ever cared for his grumpy old man shtick. My mom liked him though.
SRW1
Andy Rooney always struck me as the bearable incarnation of the ‘Get off my lawn’ guy. RIP
Breezeblock
I read his autobio. As a journalist, he flew on bomber missions and saw first-hand the concentration camps liberated. I think that’s enough to make anyone a wee bit cranky.
RIP Andy. Glad you got to see the Giants beat the Cheatriots a few years ago.
jsfox
@Yevgraf: Good grief there are times to say what’s on your mind and times you should just shut the hell up. This is the latter.
drkrick
RIP Andy. I liked most of your stuff even if you got caught being a product of your time once or twice.
He was a little older than my parents, a little younger than my grandparents. The viewpoint was familiar, but he was a hell of a lot wittier than they were when spitting it out.
And if you think he had any use for the Villager culture, you’re the kind of moron who turns a memorial thread into a flaming session. He was very much part of the Murrow group that’s slowly going to their graves appalled at what their industry has become.
WeeBey
Fuck Andy Rooney.
Kane
He spoke bravely against the Iraq invasion when many in his profession were banging the drums for war. And he pointed out the nonsense of the previous administration when many in the media were unwilling to do so. He was neither impressed nor afraid of politicians, and he wouldn’t be bullied by special interests groups. In a time before blogs, facebook and twitter, he spoke his mind creatively and thought well outside the box, more than willing to challenge the status quo. He was an American original. And he will be missed.
CarolDuhart
“He was very much part of the Murrow group that’s slowly going to their graves appalled at what their industry has become.” That’s it in a nutshell. That group started things off right, never lost sight of what it meant to be a journalist, never lost sight of what ordinary people went through. Murrow.Cronkite, Severeid ,Rooney. The only possible successors now blog or work for Propublica because there’s no room for genuine reporting anymore.
ornery
Andy Rooney was a human being who worked in media, one of the few remaining. For that alone I will honor his passing.
He may have been a curmudgeon but he was also occupying a ‘perpetual pundit’ seat that will now go to a smooth wormtongue if recent past is prologue.
cckids
I remember reading a column (I think) of his after John Lennon died. He started by giving his opinion of Lennon based on a very superficial view of John & Yoko’s anti-war stunts, paired with a “greatest generation” disdain for teh drugs & long hair. Just as I was rolling my eyes & ready to dismiss him, he wrote that, given the depth of loss some of his younger co-workers were feeling, he looked into John’s life in more depth; the changes he made to get clean, his commitment to Yoko & Sean, how meaningful his lyrics could be. Admitted he’d been uninformed & wrong. I could appreciate how rare a writer was who could do that.
Hal
I still remember his homosexual unions comment, and I think that’s always colored my views of him. I always assumed Rooney was an old Republican.
Karen
@Hal
My father is as liberal as they come but he’s not thrilled about gay marriage either. My dad will be 77. Andy’s views on gay marriage sound more like a product of Andy Rooney’s generation, not his political affiliation. After all, there are gay Republicans….
AA+ Bonds
I thought he was nice enough except he clearly blamed homosexuals for the decline of America and well
JWL
Rooney’s WW2 memoir as a reporter for Stars and Stripes is a interesting read.
His final story involved the first U.S. helicopter introduced in a theatre of war, in Burma right before the end of the Pacific War. The army trudged it up the Burma Road and attempted to launch it, only to discover they had overlooked the obvious– that at that altitude, the chopper could not sustain enough thrust to get airborne. They trudged back down, and Rooney told his editors he had no story to file. It wasn’t until much later that it dawned on him that the non-flight was the story. He was still learning his craft.
YellowJournalism
Some people are kept alive by what they enjoy doing. It seems that Rooney was that type of person.
PanAmerican
Somebody want to explain why a 92 year old man went in for any kind of surgery? An honest explanation of end of life choices… oh wait. OBAMA DEATH PANEL!!!!!
His remaining lifespan was shortened by a pointless procedure and we got to pay for it.
PurpleGirl
@PanAmerican:
If you’re talking about the share of the cost that was paid by Medicare… He’d paid into Medicare for years, just like the rest of us do (or did) and it was his right to use it.
I stopped hearing his commentary when I stopped watching 60 Minutes, but there were times when he was good and hit the point very well. He had a good, long life… RIP.
Emerald
@Karen: My Dad was 91 when Prop 8 hit the California ballot. I asked him what he thought of it. He said, “Oh who cares? Let ’em get married if they want to. They’re not hurting anybody.”
Republican for most of his life (although now he loves Obama). Not religious though, which probably explains it.
Emrventures
I always liked Andy Rooney. I have a soft spot for curmudgeons, although that seems like something of a truism coming from a Balloon Juice reader.
I respect that Rooney made his bones the old-fashioned way, covering WWII for Stars & Stripes, and working for decades as a writer and producer without much screen time. Even though he was on 60 Minutes for 30 years, he didn’t start until he was 60, after decades in the trenches doing good work.
Yes, the occasional peeks he gave into the true heart of someone born in 1919 were occasionally ugly. His ventures into poor taste over the years, though, seemed like they were just as often followed by a spat with his bosses over the abjectness of his apology, and a willingness to go on camera and say “I’m sorry, I was wrong, and I learned something from this” as opposed to the standard “I’m sorry if I offended anyone.” Everyone of every age should be as willing to man up and learn a little.
eemom
Just popping in to say I really appreciate all the good commentary on this thread. I always liked Rooney, though I haven’t watched 60 minutes for years.
And as for the folks prepared to toss out an accomplished and complex human being because he flunks the Perfect Liberal of 2011 test, all I can say is their narrow little minds are missing out on a lot more of life than a single ornery commentator.
Hal
@Karen:
I see your point, but Rooney’s comments were actually made in a commentary about things that shorten peoples lives. Smoking, eating too much, homosexual unions. He wasn’t talking about marriage, just gay sex.
John Weiss
@Yevgraf: If there’s an opening for jerk, I’ll let you know.
WeeBey
@eemom: Oh, bullshit.
He was a professional whiner who shit on John Lennon the day after he was murdered and mocked Kurt Cobain’s suicide and anyone who was saddened by it. He taunted American Indians and gay bashed often.
He was a hack television writer who pissed and moaned about whatever was nearest to hand, and comparing him to Eric Sevareid or Walter Cronkite is fucking absurd.
Fuck. Andy. Rooney.
Cliff
I present, without comment, the Andy Rooney Contest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMm4nSxPCOA
ET
Considering his last “bit” was just a few weeks ago he basically worked until the end. That is they way to go, at least to me.
David Koch
He was worst than Hitler and Obama combined.
arguingwithsignposts
@WeeBey: are you and Yevgraf auditioning for the Phelps family?
David Koch
@arguingwithsignposts: God hates Old Bags!
David Koch
@Hal: But he changed his mind. Which is ultimately what was important.
eemom
@arguingwithsignposts:
srsly. You know, I recall a time, at FDL of all places, when people actually debated about whether to say mean things about people on the very day of their passing — even really bad people.
There ARE people — e.g., Dick Cheney — whose demise I would literally throw a party to celebrate. But I kind of think that should be reserved for the worst of the worst, and I really don’t get the gleeful grave pissing we’ve seen here and on the night of Steve Jobs’ death a few weeks ago.
Bruce S
I don’t understand why people make a big deal of somebody who dies at 92. Most people don’t even live to 92. If there was going to be news about Andy Rooney it should have been on his 92nd birthday when he was still alive. That was actually unusual – being alive at 92. And he could have enjoyed the attention. Being dead at 92 is kind of like “dog bites man.” That’s not news. Dead at 92? Damn near everybody’s dead at 92. Big deal!
Did I mention that I’m also irritated that I’m not writing this on an Underwood typewriter and mailing it to you with a 5 cent stamp?
Ben Cisco (mobile)
I didn’t always agree with what he said, but he was an old school cat. Whoever replaces him will undoubtedly be worse, and for that alone I am saddened.
eemom
@Bruce S:
You have perhaps heard of the term “eulogy”? Or “celebrating the life” of one who has passed?
dww44
@Bruce S: Oh, I don’t know about this:
I don’t know where you live, but in my part of the country, there are a goodly number of folks who live well into their 90’s. Unfortunately, most of them don’t go as quickly as Andy Rooney, and certainly not with their marbles pretty much intact. I also think that post death is a good time to memorialize a person’s life. My Mom died in late September 3 weeks shy of her 94th birthday. But, she had spent the last 5 1/2 years in a nursing home making that slow progression thru dementia. Nevertheless her funeral was an occasion treasured by all who knew her. And she deservered to have her life celebrated, as indeed, does Andy Rooney.
@eemom: I come down on the side of eemom with regards to the pissing on graves of people who’ve had long productive lives. Perhaps there’s something we have lost besides an old curmudgeon this day, we’ve lost our sense of decency and respect for the lives of others who’ve passed this way before us.
lethargytartare
@WeeBey:
I knew when I saw this thread exactly what would happen – 90% positive or semi-positive hack obits, 2% “I think he was a dick,” and 8% “why can’t you 2% leave a guy alone?”
Thanks for pointing out why this guy in particular doesn’t deserve even a 1 minute grace period.
It’s pretty rich seeing people ask for a moment of respect for the grief engendered by the passing of a guy who not only couldn’t muster the same respect for others, but actively mocked and exacerbated their grieving.
Fuck Andy Rooney, indeed.
Bruce S
Good lord – does anyone recognize parody or have a sense of humor? That was an homage to the man himself!
David Koch
I always play this song when someone dies
http://youtu.be/A5iseJJ5ogA
sharl
I have no strong feelings about Mr. Rooney, but glad to read accounts about his life well lived, especially his early years.
RIP, and safe travel on the Rainbow Road. If you are taking that Final Journey in your curmudgeonly form, you may want to cover your ears and eyes, and feel your way along the path.