NY Hag
For many years, my sister gave me gift subscriptions to New York Magazine, and I became an avid fan. Michael Woolf’s credulous boom-goosing was balanced out by Michael Tomasky’s scathing investigative journalism, and their ongoing coverage of the Rudy Chronicles was worth the price of admission. Then, in the wake of George Bush’s “election,” they decided that they needed a conservative voice, and they hired the talent-free but bow-tied and well-born Tucker Carlson to air out the putatively choking liberal stench of such a subversive place as New York. Alas, it was a short romance, and Tucker migrated to dumber pastures, shortly after I wrote the letter below.
(I wrote New York two letters over several years, and they printed both. This was the second…. My record with the Oregonian stands in stark contrast)
As it often is in the “liberal” media, as surely at New York as it is at the New York Times, more than usually damning liberal books are handed over to whatever brainless and otherwise idle righty they happen to have lying around, both for “balance,” and to keep these deadwood affirmative action hires from making bigger asses of themselves by writing columns. Thus, young Tucker Carlson was called upon to review Barbara Ehrenreich’s huge bestseller, “Nickel and Dimed,” and you can imagine the results. Unable to refute a single sentence in the book, which laid out the ruthless treadmill of para-slavery on which America’s working poor must run, Tucker preferred to glory in the idea that these people were so dumb they’d never read the book and continue to vote Republican. Throw in a “nyeah, nyeah, nyeah,” and you can spare yourself reading the offensive tripe.
No discussion of facts, but just a bold admission that such people were an irrelevant, lost cause for liberals, delivered in an almost gloating, and clearly triumphant, tone. The Hag, who had actually read the book, let him have it.
From: Cocktailhag
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 3:55 PM
To: New York
Subject: My nickel
To the Editor:
The fact that Tucker Carlson’s only real argument to refute the thrust
of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is that “the poor are fairly
conservative” is unintentionally revelatory, from a party whose
deliberate obfuscations are by now so infamous.
Hard-working but uneducated white people marginalized by the greed of
the powerful are easily lulled into believing that their travails are
caused by a distant and effete “elite” in cahoots with undeserving,
freeloading minorities.
Well, duh. Hitler had great success with this message delivered to
this demographic; why shouldn’t George Bush?
Back in the 60′s, when Ronald Reagan was still just a governor,
historian Kenneth Lamott called him a “symptom, not the cause,” of a
political movement he accurately called “Parafascism.”
Thanks for reminding us, Tucker.
Cocktailhag
Portland, Oregon
Anything sound familiar?
Not at all sorry to see Tucker’s demise. He earned his disappearance. Sorry to say that your old letter is very prescient. We have gotten worse not better as far as the crazy whites are concerned. Rachel Maddow had on Frank Schaeffer the guy who is a recovered fundamentalist and whose book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back really explains how crazy these nuts are. As soon as MSNBC provides the link, I’ll post it.
I’m in love with that Frank Schaeffer… He’s like David Brock, exposing the right from the inside. More, please.
Maddow: President and Prince of Darkness with Frank Schaeffer
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/32886436#32886436
Interview starts at the 06:30 point.
None as rightly contemptuous, and righteously, as the formerly familiar, converted.
For examples: the spouses who finally ‘see the light’ and know firsthand exactly the perfect faults renounced.
But isn’t the way told in the venerable Saul cum Paul scripture?
One blessedly boosted recently to congressional-level attention is the Wendell Potter figure, former executive-level in Cigna and Humana now tell-all’ing of the health insurance scammers.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/09/15/potter-baucus/
Another (whose name escapes me now), recently turned against his own rightwing sicko hateradio play, openly ‘confessing’ the insider’s microphone aim intends on purpose to incite public disorder and derange the dumb-minded. Not that this is a new understanding, but only that one of ‘them’ finally reached moral revulsion, and crossed back to tell the truth, actively antagonize and assail the contemptible.
A personal favorite is now, finally, intelligence community ex-operatives and ex-agents coordinating organization for 9/11 truth, calling the ‘official’ Bushie Nine-Eleven Op narrative a lie and a cover-up and an unmitigated insider crime of mass murder, (a charge which has no statute of limitations for indictment).
41 U.S. Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence Agency Veterans Challenge the Official Account of 9/11
Speaking of murder charges being validly filed anytime after commission of involvement, this year (finally, again), attestment by the shipyard owner and retrieved documentation by his direction has brought to light the logistics of transporting missiles for hostages in the original ‘October Surprise’ tactic conspired by and for 1980 Reagan/Bush. Delivering the missiles (ransom) was not so simple as flying them to Iran loaded on a Pentagon plane. Indeed, misappropriated missiles were loaded on the SS Poet in a Philadelphia shipyard, the hatch welded shut, the ship navigated around Cape Horn and to the Persian Gulf, off-loaded, thence back out the Strait of Hormuz and slightly south off the coast of Oman, in the Arabian Sea intercepted and scuttled by Israeli warplanes using air-to-surface rockets — a premeditated murder of 34 crewmen and the point in the story of treason wherefore non-expiring indictments name and concern ol’ Bush 41. Because the involved shipyard owner, 30 years on, did a U-turn in his remorse.
Herbie Bush did it, murder history will record, whether or not convictions in Court do. Being the patron, and the patronage, of so very much of the fear-making fascism for, really, fifty-some years, now the developing incrimination of him (and his gang) portends a national catharsis and global relief.
Blessed are the whistleblowers for they shall summon the legal beagles with rottweiler bite.
Ah, and how the keepers of the flame shun the heretic, clinging to their wrongness like a child to its blanky. The October Surprise was so obvious, moreso once Iran/Contra came to light, but a few well-distributed pardons did the trick. That and lots of “looking forward.”
Frank Schaeffer? …meh! I’m pretty sure it was one of his post where my critical comment never made it past moderation. (His virtual apology, I thought, was not enough.)
You are my hero, CH! What a great letter to rebut the insult upon Barbara Ehrenreich’s book. (She should have MoDo’s real estate at the Times!)
NYMag actually had the gall to have Tucker Carlson, of all people, review Nickel and Dimed?! Unbelievable!
I thought it was a poor choice, too. his storied career there didn’t last much longer, though….
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By the time Dan Rather gets going, or done, suing the socks off of CBS, he might turn out to be the rehabilitated network no-good who we all are awaiting to deliver our salvation from narcotic TV entirely.
I must say that Mr. Rather is doing a service now that makes up for his rather lame career as a “watchdog.”
ESQUIRE magazine, May 2001:
http://www.esquire.com/features/man-at-his-best/ESQ0501-MAY_MAHB_OPED
That was hilarious. Thanks for the laugh, sysprog.
Mary Travers covers J.S. Bach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPbB5n-OW8Q
More at
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2009/09/mary-travers-1937-2009.html
Sound familar?
About like every other politicritter in these parts. (especially the wannabes) With the (political) circuses in NYC & Albany providing the seed pearls, and receiving more media attention than just about anywhere,(& NYC’s overbearing water/land policies) the blame-the-Other script is well-worn, by all sides(Often more than 2 horses in the race.One positive thing about the Rusty Bible Belt, though it’s usually about who can be the most reactionary.) Usually more successful in Republiklan( < typo, but it works
and Consevative primaries.