Space Oddity
Hold on, hold on, tomorrow will be there.
I'd say it's fair to give even the worst work credit where credit is due. William Lind's Victoria, for instance, actually has a few decently-written passages and its pacing is smooth, certainly smoother than some other (and otherwise far better and far less creepy) books. Compare this with say, Tom Kratman and his clunkfests (his first book had to be broken into two giant volumes because it was too big to print as a paperback and I was able to skip a full-length Carrera novel without missing anything in the overall plot).
Sometimes it makes it disappointing instead of just bad (ie "they can write well, so why are they writing this slop?" . Sometimes, as with Lind and Victoria, that one strength amplifies the rest of the issues (ie, you get this constant parade of crazy as opposed to having to wallow through five inane chapters to find one crazy one). And sometimes, especially in stories that don't have any political baggage, it can just be a redeeming quality in an otherwise dubious tale.
Exactly. If it seems like a bare-bones compliment, well, it is--Rumsfeldia can be damn painful to read at times. But the prose is at least serviceable and occasionally inspired, and while, yes its versions of Cheney and Rumsfeld are essentially caricatures of the actual men, those caricatures behave in a consistent way within the story.
This is opposed to Queen Nixon in all its volumes, where characters can twist around on the author's whim, and the prose just plods, plods, plods on.