Andrew Sullivan , the journalist and blogger, who flirted for many years with conservatism and the Republican party, has become the most reliable chronicler of the hyperbolic comings and goings of Sarah Palin. Sullivan is one of the few journalists who, almost from the beginning, has taken Palin seriously and kept up a warning drumbeat about a political phenomenon that has already turned her into the leader of the American opposition party. His minute-by-minute catalogue of Palin’s $100,000 speech the other day to the Tea Party conventioneers—of whom, Sullivan rightly...
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Everybody’s beating their breasts about Washington gridlock. Let’s defend gridlock for a moment. The opposite of gridlock was a halcyon time when Lyndon Johnson ran the Senate. But it is worth pointing out that for most of that time and a few decades before, Congress couldn’t pass a civil rights law because the Democratic Party was, itself, on this issue, gridlocked. But pay no attention to that. The larger point is that during Lyndon’s time politicians had a rapport with each other that could help overcome their ideological differences. Indeed, congressional politicians,...
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Rupert is off the reservation again. This is always a possibility when News Corp.’s quarterly earnings reports are issued and Murdoch gets on a conference call with analysts. Sometimes his people can get him to focus and rehearse and to answer questions in a disciplined way. But other times, when he’s feeling cocky or angry or jet-legged or as though he is the one and only, he won’t prepare—and then God only knows what he’s going to say. Which is largely the way the company is run: Let’s see what comes out of Rupert’s mouth. Tuesday’s call...
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Before this gets out of hand, I want to try to save the word “retarded,” which seems robust and meaningful and evocative of so much that is silly, inept, and illogical. It really does not necessarily besmirch people who are actually retarded. That word, the specifically besmirching word, with cruel connotations, evoking the fifth grade, is “retard.” Sarah Palin’s sly effort to hoist Rahm Emanuel for referring to certain liberal groups as “fucking retarded” is either a semantic stretch or, quite likely, a mix-up. She doesn’t know the difference...
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During his State of the Union address, Barack Obama promised to freeze government spending , not this year, but soon, and not on defense, Medicare, or Social Security. In Washington, this is what is known as a joke. The punch line: Yesterday’s $3.8 trillion budget proposal, which features the biggest deficit in history . Yes, Obama warned us that he wouldn’t rein in the spending right away, but the two headlines so close together sure do make the president look a little silly, don’t they? Obama’s deficit conversion is about as convincing as an IOU for a deathbed...
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Maybe the problem is not so much with sex but with books. The great thing (I mean the really great thing) about books (good books and bad books, alike) used to be that they had sex in them. They were just about the dirtiest thing going. I wonder when the last time was that anybody read a book for the dirty parts. Anyway, this is about a certain kind of author of books about sex. Jenny Sanford, Andrew Young, and Ted Haggard’s wife, Gayle, have each written a book about someone else’s sex life. These are sex lives that, in the books of a bygone era, would have as likely...
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I can offer some reasonable speculation about where this O’Keefe business is going. There are the perpetrators, the four young men who attempted to get access to the telephone system of Mary Landrieu, the Democratic senator from Louisiana. Then there is whomever else can be connected to them, by cell phone records, text messages, or email. These are the little fish. Somewhere, at some remove, with some level of foreknowledge—with enough deniability or not—are the big fish. The Times’ front page piece yesterday, with the thumbnails of the four perps,...
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A number of months ago, when he roused himself to file yet another law suit against another writer who came too close to him, I wrote a post about JD Salinger, which got no traffic. Many optimistic literary types would surely like to believe that Salinger, who died yesterday, might logically hold a special place in the hearts of the young (if only because he’s still on a lot of assigned-reading lists ). In truth, he SEO’d poorly. Probably no novelists get traffic. But Salinger, especially if you weren’t there in the pre-modern world when he was the coolest...
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In the media business, consumer technology has entered a pitched political phase. What you think about a trend or product likely reflects your organization’s interests, beliefs, and hopes for survival. The question for media companies about a new tech development is now most basic: Is it good for the Jews? (As it were.) Journalistically this is a conundrum. Many of the news organizations that are most actively covering the technology business have a vested interest in what happens. It’s a dollars-and-cents interest. But it’s religious, too. It’s about their own...
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Steve Jobs, who will be celebrated everywhere today for the great farsightedness of his tablet, is, curiously, an old fart. He’s a guy who loves his machines. He’s a tinkerer. A guy who’s most at home in a hardware store—which is really what an Apple store is, just souped up and redecorated. He’s also, in the way of old guys, an authoritarian. He wants to be stubbornly in control (even when that’s not possible). Indeed, one might fairly conclude from any interaction in an Apple store, that he is, too, rather a totalitarian—Orwellianly so. That...
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