Fly Fishing With Darth Vader, and more

by Mark Silva

You really had to ride with Janet Reno in that little red pickup truck that she drove across her native Florida in a perhaps Quixotic campaign for governor to appreciate the morning that she made a detour to an empty shopping mall in Jacksonville in a futile search for voters.

The impromptu stop prompted by a scheduling snafu led the first woman to serve as attorney general through the men's underwear section of a department store -- she even had hosted a real "Janet Reno Dance Party'' in South Beach to raise money for her failing campaign for the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the Sunshine State -- in a desperate quest for a hand to shake, anyone's hand. The Bataan-like walk through the near-empty mall ended at a women's makeup counter, where Reno was offered a makeover. She declined.

Or, you could simply read Matt Labash's account of Reno "riding again'' into the Florida swamp, or his accounts of many other odd days in the journeys of some of the oddest fits in American political suits.

The best of it is collected and bound now, for better or worse, in a volume that the senior writer for The Weekly Standard has dubbed Fly Fishing with Darth Vader And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys.

Simon and Schuster, the publisher, has printed "Labash's masterful profiles of the outsized and outrageous characters who populate America's murky periphery -- Pirate Kingfish Governor Edwin Edwards, Recovering Crackhead Mayor Marion Barry, Dirty Trickster Roger Stone.... alongside devastating pieces on the dying cities of our nation such as Detroit and New Orleans'' and "his hilarious tirades on the health hazards of Facebook and the virtues of dodgeball.... He chronicles Al Sharpton's eating habits on the campaign trail, fishes the Snake River with Dick Cheney, and investigates the "great white waste of time" that is our neighbor to the north.''

Only Matt could diss Canada so easily (we'll save Australia.)

The truth is, Matt is unencumbered by most of the conventions that bind a lot of conventional political reporters -- he still uses commas, for sure -- while marching on in the tradition of some of the best who have widened the boundaries.

They're celebrating the publication of Matt's book tonight at a book party in Washington -- we're not dropping names, so we won't mention that the bash for Labash will be staged at his buddy Tucker Carlson's house, or that Dave "Mudcat'' Saunders, the redneck savant who apparently once fed Labash deer turds, may show up. (See the notice for Matt's book at Carlson's The Daily Caller, or here, for that matter, for an understanding of how inbred Washington actually is.)

Here's to Matt, and the best for his book.