Congratulations to @AlecMacGillis, Hacktastic Douchebag of the Day

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“Alec MacGillis, staff writer of the Washington Post, needs to leave journalism immediately to find a profession in which he is half-competent.”
— Brad DeLong, March 27, 2008

Alec MacGillis is a douchebag who has lately been busy carrying “phony scandals” water for the Obama administration. As was once said of Sidney Blumenthal, if MacGillis were hired by the White House tomorrow, his first assignment would be to collect his back pay.

None of that distinguishes MacGillis from dozens of others of partisan Democrat hacks, who seem to think doing steno work for Media Matters and the DNC is courageous and innovative journalism. What sets Alec MacGillis apart is his lack of self-awareness, his evident belief that nobody is ever going to notice what a pompous fraud he really is.

MacGillis is a former Washington Post reporter who is now employed by The New Republic, a magazine that was sold last year to Facebook gazillionaire Chris Hughes, so you might think MacGillis would have a clue about which way the media winds are blowing. Sadly, no:

Craigslist’s Craig Newmark has not bought the Post, thank goodness — that would be too much to bear. But Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as the white knight provokes only slightly less shock and dolor. We knew the other guys had won a long time ago . . .

(“The other guys” = the ones who make profits.)

. . . but it’s another thing when they can waltz in and, in the charmless guise of “Explore Holdings LLC,” drop $250 million in cash for a legendary paper (that’s a mere one percent of Bezos’s net worth), as flip and easy as plucking an Apollo rocket engine from the ocean or building a $42 million, 10,000-year clock in West Texas.

(But what about Chris Hughes waltzing in, huh?)

There are already hopeful noises coming out of the corner of 15th and L about Bezos as owner, compared with other possibilities. He is promising independence. He is, for now, keeping the leadership team in place (let’s hope in particular that he keeps editor Marty Baron, under whose leadership the paper has been doing some notably hard-edged and influential journalism). His politics are not visibly objectionable. . . .

(Please tell us, Mr. MacGillis, what sort of politics are “visibly objectionable” to a professional journalist like yourself?)

But let’s not kid ourselves here: The company that made him one of the richest men in the world has had a less than benign impact on our nation. It has devastated the publishing industry, from the big presses to the small booksellers. It has exacerbated the growth of the low-wage economy, to the point where the president feels the need to celebrate an increase in warehouse jobs that will pay barely more than minimum wage. . . .

(Hey, f–k you, Alec. What I consider “less than benign” is not that Amazon warehouse workers are paid so little, but rather that you are paid so much, you worthless dishonest hack.)

More generally, Amazon has embodied, more than any other of the giants that rule our new landscape, the faster-cheaper-further mindset that scratches away daily at our communal fabric: Why bother running down to the store around the block if you can buy it with a click? No risk of running into someone on the way and actually having to talk to them, and hey, can you beat that price? No thought given to the externalities that make that price possible –the workers being violently shocked every time they pull a book off the warehouse shelf, or losing a chunk of their lunch break to go through the security checkpoint set up by their oh-so-trusting employer. They’re Somewhere Else, working for a company that is Out There, in the cloud. . . .

(Shop now for big savings at Amazon!)

I avoid buying from Amazon as best I can, but I’ll keep subscribing to my old paper as long as they keep printing it . . .

And so much for your influence, you hacktastic douchebag. Nobody really likes you, and this is not their fault, Alec MacGillis.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

146 comments

  1. “None of that distinguishes MacGillis from dozens of others of partisan Democrat hacks, who seem to think doing steno work for Media Matters and the DNC is courageous and innovative journalism.”
    When you are that corrupt and removed from truth (and reality), along with living in a deep and abiding moral void, I’d say maybe you are courageous to spew the tripe (ridiculous lies) they do on a daily basis. Idk, maybe just mega-demented (new word).

  2. Excellent article and insights, Robert. I must say, hacktastic douchebag tends to lend a bit of class to this POS.

  3. Supposedly Bezos is such an innovator blah, blah,blah.

    Yet Amazon is still using an outdated and annoying interface that won’t allow it’s users to search easily for what they want.

    I’m referring to the fact that although a search for something on Amazon may turn up a bazillion results, you are allowed to zero in on the price you want to pay because they won’t allow you to jump more than a couple of pages at a time. This means that (if you select something) you wind up selecting what ever they have “conveniently” made the easiest to get to.

    Hmm wonder if stuff THEY’RE selling gets top billing?

    PS; Stacy, don’t you derive some modicum of revenue from Amazon? And if so then you and other recipient associates are complicit in whatever Amazon does?

    Me I won’t buy their e books. Remember back when they were like .99 and everyone jumped on the band wagon. Then like a crack dealer, they upped the price and lo and behold you pay almost as much for an e book as for a dead tree. And you don’t even OWN the ebook.

    I worry that one day all the digits will disappear and we’ll be swept back to an age that we can’t live in anymore.

  4. Bezos is your typical hypocritical leftist. 88% of his political donations went to Democrats. Like all leftists with money and power, he views himself as the exception to the rules that he wants to impose on others. An example of this is his support for politicians who are in bed with unions, yet his ongoing fight against unions in Europe. My prediction: he will clean house at the Post. Anyone who does not contribute to the bottom line will be out on their ear. And he will be ruthless about it.

  5. Hey Alec, “Why bother running down to the store around the block if you can buy it with a click?”

    How ’bout because I don’t live in your urban paradise where everything I want is available right down the street? The only “department store” in town is Walmart, and the nearest “shopping mall” is 40 minutes away. There is no store “around the block.”

    Amazon lets me get easy access to items that I can’t source locally. Exqueeze me for living in rural America and not the hoity-toity, well provisioned coasts.

  6. First thing Bezos should do is cut everyone back to 30hrs/wk. Wonder if we’d get an influx of human nature stories on Obamacare then…?

  7. Don’t you hate these urban provincials who think they’re more sophisticated than the rest of us?

  9. The price went up because the publishers demanded it. Even arranged with Apple to fix the prices — you may have heard about it; there was a lawsuit.

  10. “the workers being violently shocked every time they pull a book off the warehouse shelf”

    WTF?

    “losing a chunk of their lunch break to go through the security checkpoint set up by their oh-so-trusting employer”

    Because NO ONE else EVER has to go through security. EVER.

  11. “Amazon has embodied, more than any other of the giants that rule our new
    landscape, the faster-cheaper-further mindset that scratches away daily
    at our communal fabric….” I await with breathless anticipation other riveting articles on issues that are ripping apart our “communal fabric”: illegal immigration, amnesty, same sex marriage, compulsory funding of birth control by religious institutions, teaching a second grader to put a condom on a cucumber . . . .

  13. “but it’s another thing when they can waltz in and, in the charmless
    guise of “Explore Holdings LLC,” drop $250 million in cash for a
    legendary paper”

    Yeah… didn’t the Boston Globe sell recently too?

    Yep, the NYT holding company bought it in 1993 for 1.1 BILLION and sold it for 70 MILLION.

    Getting 250 million for your “legendary” comparable item (to one that lost 93% of it’s value in 20 years) probably is a damn fine deal.

    “Legendary” may mean something to you; but does it make more money than it spends? If you want to get paid more, that’s going to be important.

  14. Their sophistication comes largely from maintaining massive, Democrat Voter Plantations. Several of which are coming to resemble gulags (or worse, like those dystopian places portrayed in movies where the inner city has been walled off to keep the feral population at bay).

    It reminds me of my one trip to Vegas, where I saw firsthand that my ability to stay in a fantastic hotel and eat like a king for cheap was directly tied to those poor losers who sat at the same machine, day after day after day waiting to ring up three cherries (or whatever the symbol is for a big win these days).

    I’m just more comfortable working like a dog for my prosperity. (Such as it is.)

  15. Nope. Hating them would take more emotional energy than they’re worth. I’m not even sure their opinions are actually worth the “mild irritation” I frequently feel.

  16. Well, if the media were run as a for-profit business, that would be good for the country.

    I’m sure we’ll get little of that.

  17. He’s referring to reports that there is so much static electricity in the book warehouses that the workers are repeatedly getting painfully shocked.

  18. Every penny I save on my Amazon purchases goes to feed my family and pay down my mortgage. Gas and food aren’t cheap, no matter how they rig the inflation index. Perhaps a well connected Obama sychophant doesn’t have to live in the realities of the Obama economy, but for those who do it’s a blessing that Amazon provides affordable access to almost any good.

    As this country sees further lawlessness in its administration, and as the legislature passes the buck on its responsibilities time and time again, and as our debt and ‘entitlements’ loom as existential threats to the country, Obama’s sychophants are mad about another successful American business. Sigh.

  19. So don’t buy parts for your Nissan … whose warehouse workers (the very few left to do the sweeping and such the robots don’t do) in their parts distribution warehouses are paid low non-union wages and work part-time to avoid benefits. They too must go through security because a packet of washers just might have fallen in their pocket …

    Companies must address their bottom line, must turn a profit and produce dividends for their stock/share holders.

    Excessive regulations by the federal government make that damn near impossible today for most businesses and the area most often reduced is wages and benefits because every other area is heavily regulated and cannot be touched.
    Kill the goose that lays the golden egg to prevent it from laying another … that way lies totalitarian control of all businesses and the national economy.
    Our nation and society are already morally bankrupt and damn near insolvent financially, all thanks to the progressive assclowns in government and their lapdog media.
    How I long for the 70’s: a free and unfettered media and a vibrant economy (China was just opened to the US for trade and my successors screwed the pooch on that).

  20. “The company that made him one of the richest men in the world has had a less than benign impact on our nation. It has devastated the publishing industry, from the big presses to the small booksellers. It has exacerbated the growth of the low-wage economy…[]”

    So, the current big dog publishers have a right to their closed system and locked-in profits? And, how dare some upstart like Amazon out there in Seattle come along and put all those New Yorkers out of work! Is that what MacGillis is saying?

    News flash: adapt or die. It has always been that way. Bezos figured out how to provide the retail experience at lower cost to the consumer and to his company, and so he has become wealthy by solving the problem of people obtaining what they want quickly and cheaply better than others. In books, Bezos realizes that all that dead wood (physically and metaphorically) adds no value, so why not eliminate it? I have hundreds of Kindle ebooks and they are everywhere… at my desktop, on my phone or tablet, or even on a Kindle. And, Bezos/Amazon gives authors 70% of the retail price in royalties. Compare that to, what, 15% from the dead tree publishers? Who’s gotten richer, Tom Clancy or his publisher? You can’t say that about the Amazon millionaire authors… they’ve certainly profited more than Amazon has.

    MacGillis is really just trying to protect the interests of the people he identifies with, the entrenched oligarchy who historically used the expense of publishing as a protective barrier against competition. It’s too late. The virtual barbarians have stormed the physical gates, and the old guard has been cut off and left for dead. Because they are as good as dead, and they know it. It’s just a matter of time. Maybe Bezos will be able to salvage the value from the Post and bring it into the digital era successfully, after he jettisons the baggage. Or maybe not, but it’s a cheap experiment.

  21. I disagree. The two most amazingly solid applications in web history are Google and Amazon.

    Do they have bugs? Of course. They are on the web, therefore they have bugs. Are they evil? Sure, at times. Like everything else.

    But I’ve shopped online since the concept was invented, and somehow I always end up going back to Amazon because I can’t get what I want anyplace else, or most often, because the online ordering and delivering apps elsewhere are poorly programmed, and simply do not work.

    I don’t want wiz-bang. I want click-and-it-works. Amazon gets that right far more often than all of the other places I buy from.

    And I live in a rural area, so I shop online a LOT.

    I also make a living programming for the web, databases, and interfaces. ALL of them are annoying. Most of the really cool ones are only cool because they rely heavily on flash or some of the HTML5 stuff that replaces flash. Cool like that is highly annoying because it breaks so easily and takes forever to fix.

    Amazon isn’t a BMW. That would be nice. It’s more like a Ford F-150.

  22. “Excessive regulations by the federal government make that damn near
    impossible today for most businesses and the area most often reduced is
    wages and benefits because every other area is heavily regulated and
    cannot be touched.”

    THIS, from the guy who actually tried to give us wage and price controls? Can’t get much more excessive than that….

  23. Journalists seem to be fixated on Amazon as a bookseller, but they sell all kinds of stuff — computers, TV, jewelry — and you might think that liberals who hate Wal-Mart would be happy that Amazon is competing against Wal-Mart. And at least the UPS guys who deliver Amazon products make a decent wage.

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