November 8, 2004

silhouette3.JPG From the desk of Jane Galt:

Overtaken By Events

OTBE is a journalist's worst nightmare, and it's on prominent display in this month's Atlantic letters section (subscription only), including back-to-back assertions that we haven't had a president win a majority of the popular vote since 1988, and that Osama is dead. It's a little guilt-free schadenfreude, if you've got a subscription (and if you don't, you should!)

Posted by Jane Galt at November 8, 2004 6:20 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
Comments
Posted by: Joel Mackey on November 8, 2004 9:30 PM

Oh the guilt of not having a subscription...

No funeral..

BANG!

Posted by: Begbee on November 8, 2004 10:16 PM

I would love to see jr read schadenfreude off a teleprompter. Probably come out skadenfroody....

Posted by: Lynxx Pherrett on November 9, 2004 4:09 AM

No subscription to The Atlantic, but I doubt any of those letters come close to touching Jimmy Breslin's Election Day column in Newsday for sheer hubristic overreach.

Posted by: M410 on November 9, 2004 5:56 AM

I don't have a subscription but I regularily buy the Atlantic off the newstand. About 6 months ago they started getting flakey and after getting burned a couple times I decided not to automatically buy new issues. So while I bought and enjoyed "Al-Qaeda's Harddrive" I gave "Bush's Lost Year" and "The Tragedy of Tony Blair" a pass. I'll likely buy November's issue because I love anything with the troops in Iraq (even slanted stuff) and Robert Kaplan is not to be missed.

Posted by: BAW on November 9, 2004 8:00 AM

The best portion of the letters section comes from the folks responding to last month's letter from an MD that attempted to diagnose Bush sight unseen with either Parkinsons or a mental disorder.

The fact that some of the doctors responding actually CONCUR with the original writer's assessment (without that doctor ever having, you know, SEEN the president or examined him) made the decision to let our subscription lapse extremely easy.

Posted by: ABR on November 9, 2004 1:12 PM

We dropped our subscription after they started publishing trash like the Kaplan "Supremacy by Stealth" article last year. That type of childish macho-military masturbation would have been better placed in a magazine like _Soldier of Fortune_, and in general we weren't conservative hawks enough to stomach the steady diet of biased Middle East and terrorism articles they decided in early 2003 to make their bread and butter.

(Maybe they've relented a little bit judging by BAW's report just above.. not a single critical letter of the Kaplan article (including my own) was published.)

Posted by: Karl Gallagher on November 9, 2004 2:36 PM

I'm with M410. I still have every issue from Mike Kelly's tenure there, but his legacy has mostly vanished from it these days. Sigh.

Comments are Closed.