November 08, 2004
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 06:20 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksOh the guilt of not having a subscription...
No funeral..
BANG!
Posted by: Joel Mackey on November 8, 2004 09:30 PMI would love to see jr read schadenfreude off a teleprompter. Probably come out skadenfroody....
Posted by: Begbee on November 8, 2004 10:16 PMNo 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: Lynxx Pherrett on November 9, 2004 04:09 AMI 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: M410 on November 9, 2004 05:56 AMThe 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: BAW on November 9, 2004 08:00 AMWe 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.)
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.
Posted by: Karl Gallagher on November 9, 2004 02:36 PMComments are Closed.