Category: R.S. McCain School of Journalism

The Columbia Journalism Review Is (Still) Depraved and Decadent

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“In the context of journalism, here, we are dealing with a new kind of ‘lead’ — the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.
“What?
“Do we have a libel suit on our hands?
“Probably not, I think, because nobody in his right mind would take a thing like that seriously — and especially not that gang of senile hags who run the Columbia Journalism Review, who have gone to great lengths in every issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag,” Rolling Stone, July 4, 1974 (collected in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)

The best possible career advice anybody could give ambitious young journalists is this: Get the hell out of the journalism racket.

Go to law school. Start dealing methamphetamine. Go do something — anything — where the work-to-reward ratio doesn’t require a masochist’s appetite for constant humiliation.

However, if you’re one of those mule-headed young fools who refuses to heed such wisdom, or if you’re someone who pursues a career in journalism because you have no aptitude for any honest vocation, please keep in mind these two invaluable pieces of advice:

  1. Quit your bitching and get to work. Nothing is less interesting than journalists whining about the low pay, wretched hours and miserable working conditions of their trade.
  2. Ignore the Columbia Journalism Review.

There is no greater waste of time than sitting around reading a magazine about journalism, edited by swine who are self-evidently incapable of earning an honest dollar, and who therefore attach themselves to the teats of an Ivy League university journalism department.

The only thing worse that reading CJR is writing for CJR, and I don’t know how Ben Adler will ever overcome the stigma of having contributed an article to that monument to uselessness:

In 2009, an editor for a new website called The Faster Times, which sought to be “an edgier Huffington Post,” emailed to ask if I was interested in a part-time job. I didn’t know it was possible to be edgier than HuffPo, but their payment scheme was certainly more innovative. Whereas HuffPo paid staff reporters the old-fashioned way, with a salary and benefits, while paying freelancers nothing at all, The Faster Times was creating a third way. Instead of staff writers, it had contributors who spent roughly 10 hours a week blogging and aggregating news on a given topic. In exchange, they would receive a majority of the revenue generated by ads sold on the pages they created. It took me a while to realize the editor was suggesting that I promise to perform a regular amount of work in exchange for no guaranteed payment at all.

Actually, it’s not a bad article, and it’s a crying shame that Adler couldn’t find a respectable venue willing to publish it. The plight of young freelancers in the New Media environment must indeed be dire, when someone like Adler — a promising writer who seems to have real talent — is so desperate that he would be willing to let his byline appear in CJR.

Deperate young freelancers who are unwilling to augment their incomes by dealing dangerous narcotics can probably be excused for such gestures of despair as writing for CJR.

If Dave Weigel hadn’t been growing potent hybrid sinsemilla in his D.C. townhouse for the past few years, he never would have been able to survive on the pittance he gets from those thieving vultures at Slate, and Alex Pareene’s status as East Coast kingpin of the Cambodian opium traffic was the only way he could afford to write for ripoff outfits like Gawker and Salon. Adler examines the grim alternatives:

Today’s aspiring magazine writers might be better advised to start their own websites, promote them on their Twitter feeds, freelance for no paycheck, and hope for good things to happen.
These days, you might start out by writing an unpaid piece for HuffPo or The Awl (and hope it goes viral), or blogging 12 times a day, as a job I interviewed for at Curbed last year required. You might be working from home, without an editor to mentor you. You might be earning no money, or never knowing what you will earn, month to month.

Writing an unpaid piece for HuffPo? My God! This is the most disreputable thing any journalist could ever do, short of joining the editorial staff of CJR or informing the DEA that Reason magazine editor Matt Welch controls the crack cocaine trade in Anacostia. Resourcefulness is required for today’s young journalists, Adler says:

The new approach has worked so far for Emma Carmichael, a 2010 Vassar graduate who moved to New York hoping to break into journalism. While working days at a public-relations firm, she wrote unpaid pieces for The Awl. She credits those clips with helping her land an unpaid internship at Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog. That led to a job as a paid staff writer at Deadspin, and she has since been promoted to managing editor of Gawker.

Deadspin is another plantation in Nick Denton’s blog-slave empire, and “managing editor of Gawker” is a title like SS-Obergruppenführer — a gig with a few perks and a certain amount of status, but unlikely to endear you to the victims of your crimes against humanity. Exactly how a graduate of Vassar (annual tuition $45,580) could be compelled to pursue that kind of gruesome work, Adler doesn’t bother to explain, but he does point out the most obvious problem facing commandants of these online concentration camps:

Meanwhile, every editor of a website with one of these new payment models acknowledges a common quandary: People are willing to wax philosophical or crack jokes for free, but not to do real reporting. “One of the gaps we have is that I would like to have more reporting,” says [former Gawker editor Choire] Sicha [who now runs another site]. “The scale of the economics doesn’t work for that, necessarily.”

And indeed, why should any reasonably ambitious writer “do real reporting” for peanuts, when they could make a lot more money cooking moonshine whiskey or selling bootleg oxycontin? But there’s probably no need to drag Nick Gillespie into this argument . . .

My point is that there is nothing wrong with 21st-century journalism except (a) the continued existence of the Columbia Journalism Review and (b) the shortage of good, cheap mescaline. And if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. IYKWIMAITYD.

 

Turbo-Tax Tim Does 3 Sunday Shows UPDATE: Geithner Praises Obama’s ‘Incredibly Effective’ Economic Policies

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The Treasury Secretary is ubiquitous on Tax Day:

  • ABC This Week: Timothy Geithner.
  • NBC Meet the Press: Timothy Geithner; Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
  • CBS Face the Nation: Timothy Geithner; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
  • CNN State of the Union: Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee; Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.
  • Fox News Sunday: Ed Gillespie, adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; David Axelrod, adviser to President Obama’s re-election campaign.

UPDATE: Kool-Aid? Anybody want some Kool-Aid?

President Obama’s economic policies “were incredibly effective,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday, crediting the president with having prevented a depression.
While admitting it is “still a very tough economy out there,” Geithner said the administration is “making a lot of progress” and said “the broad indicators are pretty encouraging.”
Interviewed on ABC’s This Week, Geithner was asked by host George Stephanopoulos about the gloomy forecasts from economists such as New York University professor Nouriel Roubini, who called the current recovery “anemic, subpar, below trend, below potential.”
Geithner suggested Obama could not be blamed for that, saying “if he’d had more support from his opponents in Congress, then we could have got more things passed that would have put more people back to work more quickly.” . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator, which I hope citizen-journalists will study as a lesson in Neutral Objective Journalism. One of the basic jobs of a D.C. political reporter is the Sunday show round-up: What did the “newsmakers” (government officials, party leaders, candidates, etc.) say on the Sunday shows?

If you can do nothing else from the comfort of home, you can always report What People Say on TV. The key to doing that effectively, however, is to write it as straight news: “Joe Friday, Just-the-Facts-Ma’am” is a style that anyone can learn by study and practice. Repress your bloggerly temptation to snark it up, resist any urge you might have toward sensationalism, and just tell it straight. Identify the key quotes and facts and assemble them into the kind of basic reporting that wire services do.

When doing a Sunday show roundup, you generally want to work pretty quick: If your version isn’t online by noon or 1 p.m. Eastern, you might as well not bother. But on other occasions and with other kinds of What People Say on TV stories, you may have time — if you think nobody else saw the significance of the interview, news story or C-SPAN segment you saw — to fill in the background from other sources.

Some may ask, “Where’s the value-added? Anybody can see what people say on TV. Why should I do my own version of the story? Why not just link the Associated Press or Politico story and add my own caustic ideological sarcasm?” I reply that the way other sources assemble the quotes and facts — the way they do Neutral Objective Journalism — inevitably introduces a certain angle or bias to the story.

You will discover, if you try your hand at writing the What People Say on TV story, that there is no such thing as neutrality, no matter how straightforward and factual your account may be. Other than transcripts, every news story on a subject of political controversy (and what Tim Geithner said Sunday was obviously such a case) includes elements of selection and emphasis that amount to a slant. Continue reading Turbo-Tax Tim Does 3 Sunday Shows UPDATE: Geithner Praises Obama’s ‘Incredibly Effective’ Economic Policies →

When the Blogosphere Gets Weird …

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. . . the weird get blogging, and the past few days have kept me tied up in all kinds of “deep” stuff that prevented me from keeping up with the flow of events on the blogosphere. First there was that weirdness about the Planned Parenthood bombing in Wisconsin and the MSNBC “Republican War on Women” meme. Then I spent yesterday immersing the entirety of my cerebral cortex in campaign-finance reports and the details of the Florida primary campaign in order to locate the precise moment when Newt Gingrich’s campaign became an irretrievable disaster.

So I’m trying to get back in the flow now, which isn’t helped when Bill Quick — The Guy Who Named the Blogosphere — whacks me for my post about Gingrich. Look, Bill: This stuff is important, OK?

The big media are going to tell their own version of the 2012 campaign, shaped by their various prejudices in favor of the Conventional Wisdom, and so there is real value in publicly re-examining the facts of the campaign, thus to provide at least the raw materials for crafting a counter-narrative. It might be nice if there were a think tank, a philanthropic foundation or a book publisher offering to cut me a fat check, so I could afford to hire an assistant do all the research — e.g., what’s the daily charter rate for a 16-seat Gulfstream IV? — but as it is, there’s just me and I’m actually kind of enjoying it.

Remember my wild ride to McCarran International Airport with the Best Cab Driver in Vegas? I’d forgotten all about that until I started digging back through the archives. If the GOP primary campaign is now effectively over (an assertion that Rick Santorum certainly does not accept), then the question of How We Got Here becomes a matter of historical interest, because those who don’t know history are doomed.

Then again, maybe we’re all doomed.

Maybe history is now repeating itself for the very last time. But the ancient Mayans could not be reached for comment.

At any rate, Bill Quick’s contempt for Rick Santorum isn’t what this story is about, except insofar as it serves as an example of how the perception of candidates affects the reality of campaigns. If you’ll check page 404 of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, you’ll find Hunter S. Thompson talking about how “perception” was the key word to understanding what went wrong with George McGovern’s campaign.

Of course, looking back over the distance of four decades, it is possible to perceive that McGovern was doomed beyond all hope of redemption from Day One, that Nixon’s Campaign to Re-Elect the President was destined to crush whoever got the Democratic Party nomination that year, and that any perception to the contrary was never more than a mirage.

Let’s not ponder whether that shoe is now on the other foot, eh?

Leaving aside such premonitions, I remain fascinated by the gap between perception and reality in politics, and what happened to the Gingrich campaign is a textbook example: On that Monday before the Florida primary, Newt was still the national front-runner, barely a week had passed since he’d beaten Mitt Romney in South Carolina and — if all you knew was what you saw on Fox News — it was going to be Newt-vs.-Mitt all the way to the end.

But there was something drastically wrong with that perception. I sensed the disconnect, but couldn’t quite identify or adequately describe what it was that bugged me. It wasn’t until I took the time to start going through the details of the FEC reports (which of course weren’t available at the time) that I located the relevant facts, demonstrating that while Newt had already passed his fundraising peak on Jan. 22, his campaign was still spending as if those days of six-figure contributions would stretch forward infinitely.

This was, I say, a Neutral Objective Fact — but a fact that was not known at the time, and its shrewd concealment permitted the Gingrich campaign (which was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy throughout February) to maintain an illusion of viability for several more weeks. The revelation of how such a perception-reality gap developed may not disturb Bill Quick, given his animus toward Santorum’s social conservatism. Yet it might disturb those conservatives whose idea was to find the strongest “Not Romney” candidate in order to prevent the GOP Establishment from once again imposing a non-conservative nominee on the unwilling grassroots.

Surely there must have been many millions of Republican voters, and thousands of campaign contributors, whose primary motive in backing Newt was their belief that he was the Only Candidate Who Could Stop Romney. By the end of January, however, that belief was already being falsified by the Gingrich campaign’s overspending, tactical errors, and strategic miscalculations. Yet they were able to keep up the pretense of viability all through February and on into March.

Maybe that doesn’t bother you any more than it bothers Bill Quick, but don’t you think it’s an important reality that deserves to be understood? Just look at today’s headlines:

President Obama raises nearly
$1.5 million in 3 hours
— The Hill

Effort would change Texas primary
to winner take all, benefit Santorum
— Austin American-Statesman

Rob Portman tops veepstakes
— Politico

What is the reality-perception gap today? What unknown facts contradict our superficial perception of political events, a perception based on news coverage that can never include all the facts? How much different would our perception be, if we were privy to all the relevant facts, rather than just those facts we glean from media accounts that are always incomplete, even when they are not actually biased?

Maybe that’s too “meta.” Never mind. I try not to take this stuff too personally. Go hit Bill Quick’s tip jar, just to let him know it’s OK.

Dude, Did You Have to Diss Ann Coulter? Also: Obama Has ‘Certainly Been Massively Disappointing to Young People’

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Let’s face it: Ever since Ann Coulter volunteered as head cheerleader for Team Romney, some of Miss Coulter’s longtime conservative defenders have been under tremendous pressure to denounce her.

The problem is that nearly all the people who joined the anti-Coulter movement back in the day — and I’m looking at you, Ace of Spades — are also now on the “Roll Over for Romney” bandwagon. So while I defended her when she called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “raghead” and called John Edwards a “faggot,” I should probably be content to let Ace (and Sean Hackbarth, Ed Morrissey, Joy McCann, et al.) defend Miss Coulter now that she’s snuggling up with Mister Inevitability.

Nevertheless, I was irritated when I saw that Matt Lewis cited Ann Coulter as an example of a media “peacock” in a Daily Caller item he posted last week, even while Matt was making a point worth considering:

[On March 16], there was tremendous buzz about a picture of Rick Santorum sunbathing. I’m sure it got a lot of hits, but  it was completely irrelevant, and utterly vapid. I’m sure we probably ran it — we sort of had to. But can you imagine back in the old days if a reporter had  come to a grizzled, old newspaper editor with the idea of publishing that photo?  The old fella might have said, “Son, we’re not going to run that because it’s  not news. We’re not going to run that as long as I’m here. I don’t care if other  newspapers do — we’re not. Now get the hell out of my office!”
Today, that old guy is dead. Or retired — probably pushed out by some  upstart.

Having dealt with a few grizzled old newspaper editors in my day, I very well see the point Matt is trying to make. What is happening is that the news media are being democratized, for both good and ill, so that the readers get whatever the readers want, including society reporters turned strippers and NFL cheerleader sex scandals.

Yet I’ve always said that if I were ever put in charge of a newspaper, I’d run it like the NY Post: Lots of celebrities, scandals, sports and crime stories to pull in the readers, thus to pay the bills for the political coverage and the right-wing op-ed pages.

So if I were the grizzled old editor and some reporter brought me a picture of Rick Santorum sunbathing, my response would be: “What the hell is wrong with you, kid? I said I wanted Ann Romney bikini pictures! Now get to work on it, or you’re fired!”

Part of what’s wrong with the conservative movement — and maybe we can discuss this at “DoomCon 2012” — is a sense of insecurity that manifests itself as a craving for respectability.

This prudishly superficial concern with being “respectable” causes some conservatives to scurry for cover the minute Ann Coulter says “faggot” or Rush Limbaugh says “slut,” so that all liberals have to do is make a big deal about some silly little “gaffe” or “scandal” and they win.

Wake the hell up, conservatives: Are you going to let Politico and Media Matters pick your leaders and spokesmen for you? Remember Breitbart!

OK, so that’s my rant about that. Meanwhile, via the eminently respectable Washington Free Beacon, we have this delightful video:

Obama has “certainly been massively disappointing to young people,” says Stephen Marche of Esquire, a liberal magazine that features lots of pictures of nearly naked women.

Polls show Obama’s popularity among the young “started at 63 percent and I think it’s in the 30s now,” says Marche. “It just continues to fall.”

Good. Now go get me those Ann Romney bikini pictures.

Update: linked by Fishersville Mike.

Long Before The Infamous Speedo, There Was The Mullet

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by Smitty

It’s Stacy McCain’s birthday today. How about we break out some cheer. Consider: a snapshot from the early days of color photography, Stacy’s youth:Now, Stacy has not formally denied that this is him, clutching his Cuddlewhumpus County, Alabama Annual Noodling Contest and Catfish Fry, Third Place, Youth Division trophy, but that’s what I heard.

Quick poll: is it high time that Stacy resurrect the mullet?

Update: Linked at The Lonely Conservative.

The Irony of Tucker Carlson, Sarah Palin, Mike Tyson, Greta Van Susteren and … Me

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Scene from “Daily Caller Downfall”

“In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost by a slim 19,000 vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps 10,000 of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty, who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by that worthless a–hole Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) and turned into a major issue.
“So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey’s people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the Sheriff and all his Deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Guilt-by-association smears are an ever-present danger in political life, and my carefully cultivated bad reputation probably keeps me from scoring some “exclusives” I might otherwise get. But the upside is that there is no one trying to tempt me through the revolving door that separates journalism from politics.

No Republican, not even Herman Cain, could get away with hiring me as a “media consultant” or “communications strategist” or some other type of glorified P.R. gig, so there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll ever become Jay Carney, and thank God for that.

Nor is it likely that I’ll be invited onto one of Sean Hannity’s “Great American” panels, because the executives at Fox News understand that their on-air choices are seen as officially symbolic of Conservatism, Inc. Every sin committed by Roger Ailes is somehow blamed on the GOP, and so even if I were as telegenic as Megyn Kelly, they’d never invite me to do the pundit gig on Fox. I’d stand a better chance of becoming a regular contributor on Rachel Maddow’s show.

It is therefore highly ironic — indeed, morbidly amusing — to watch Tucker Carlson getting raked over the coals by Greta Van Susteren:

What Tucker can’t seem to bring himself to admit is that about 10 minutes worth of careful editing would have put Jeff Poor’s article into the safety zone where not even the most zealous Palinista, nor even Sarah Palin herself, would have had any cause to complain:

Mike Tyson Targets Sarah Palin
in Obscene Sexual, Racial Rant

Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson engaged in a lurid and lengthy sexual rant about Sarah Palin during an interview broadcast on a Las Vegas radio station.
Referring to unsubstantiated claims in a new book that the former Alaska governor once dated former professional basketball player Glenn Rice, Tyson fantasized at length about Palin having sex with another former NBA player, Dennis Rodman. Both Rice and Rodman are black, and Tyson made graphic reference to racial stereotypes as he asked KWWV-AM hosts Paul Howard, Mitch Moss and Seat Williams to “imagine Palin with a big old black stallion.”
Tyson, who was convicted in 1992 of raping a teenage beauty pageant contestant, asserted that Palin “needed” to have sex with a black man, an experience he said “every white girl” desires in order to “get that out of their system.”
“Every uppity white middle class [woman says] . . . ‘Gotta get me a black man before I go prosper in this white world,'” Tyson said during the interview, provoking hysterical laughter from the hosts of the “Gridlock” program on the ESPN Radio affiliate station.
Saying he had read Joe McGinniss’s new “unauthorized biography” of the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, Tyson said, “Isn’t that beautiful to hear Palin [had sex with] a black man? . . . Her and her sister were into that stuff.” . . .

An article written that way might have included a sentence to the effect, “A spokesman for Governor Palin did not respond to a request for comment on Tyson’s remark.” And that kind of article could have led to a discussion of harm that results from such stereotypical attitudes.

Instead, we have Tucker Carlson trying to defend the legitimacy of a bad editorial judgment. And there are multiple layers of irony in the fact that I’m the guy pointing this out. Chief among the several ironies is this: When I was on the national desk at The Washington Times, I was always the “loose cannon” in the newsroom testing the boundaries of what could be printed in our “family-friendly” newspaper. Go ask Ken Hanner, Victor Morton or Geoff Etnyre how many times as an assistant editor I got chewed out for sending to the copy desk articles that got flagged as including language that senior editors disapproved.

Given that background, I can empathize with the predicament that Jeff Poor and Tucker Carlson have found themselves in, but cannot for the life of me understand Carlson’s defense. He seems to have the idea that Greta Van Susteren (and Tammy Bruce and Jedadiah Bila and everyone else who objected to the Tyson article) somehow expected the Daily Caller to ignore this incident. Carlson is pretending that the only way to report the story was the way that Jeff Poor reported it.

Allegations that the article represents an anti-Palin attitude — or a “boys club” environment — at the Daily Caller could be dismissed if Carlson would admit that the article, as originally published, was gratuitously offensive.

Of course, I have at times been accused of writing gratuitously offensive things on my blog, but that’s just me. This blog is not a publishing company into which people were invited to invest millions of dollars to create the “conservative answer to the Huffington Post,” which was Tucker Carlson’s original selling point for the Daily Caller. When I responded to Carlson’s boastful May 2009 announcement by saying that his proposed project “better not suck,” I scarcely expected that by September 2011, the Daily Caller would be accused by Greta Van Susteren of inciting sexual violence against women. Nor did I expect I’d be laughing myself to tears over Richard McEnroe’s “Downfall” parody:

And if you feel an urge to hit the tip jar — hey, don’t fight the feeling!

UPDATE: Ace of Spades:

The original article is neutrally written. There is not a suggestion of the writer’s belief that Mike Tyson is out-of-bounds, not a word of criticism for the ESPN radio hosts for taking the interview here. . . .
Sometimes it’s hard to read tone, but the sense I got from the original piece was that the best jokes were being highlighted. . . .
Locker-room sex stuff. And just in case it isn’t already risque enough, Tyson starts throwing in some weird racial stuff, too.

Which is, I think, perhaps unfair to Jeff Poor. I know Jeff Poor, who did good work for Newsbusters, and don’t believe that he quoted Tyson’s remarks with an idea of derogating Palin.

What I actually think is that a lot of younger people, accustomed to watching Comedy Central where this kind of “humor” is commonplace, take it for granted. And in the Internet age, where everything is just one Google search away, it might seem that there is no harm in repeating whatever is already “out there.” Tucker Carlson is 10 years younger than me, and Jeff Poor is also young, and this is probably the reason why they reacted to the criticism the way they did.

After Dan Riehl brought attention to the Daily Caller article, my response was horror at what Tyson said:

The blog-war aspect of this incident rather dwindles into insignficance when measured against the apparent willingness of a Las Vegas radio station to allow Mike Tyson to spew such filthy and derogatory racial stereotypes.

And I still wish that was the focus of discussion: Why did these radio sports-talk guys raise this Palin question with Mike Tyson, then laugh at his response as if it were the funniest thing they’d ever heard? You don’t have to be a prude or a women’s studies major to be stunned by what Ace euphemistically calls the “weird racial stuff” in Tyson’s diatribe. A thorough discussion of that, however, would require mining another layer of irony I’d rather not deal with this afternoon, so I’ll content myself to quote my original reaction:

Now that I think of it, have we heard from Jill Filipovic, Jessica Valenti, Melissa McEwan or any of the other feminists? Because if Sarah Palin weren’t a Republican, I think they’d probably be outraged by this.

But I guess Sandra Bernhard answered that question three years ago, huh?

UPDATE II: Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

The damage to The Daily Caller is enormous. . . . This is a disaster compounded by the folks at The Daily Caller digging while in a hole, and digging even harder when people called them out on it, and doubling down on the digging as it went viral.

Like Professor Jacobson, Bob Belvedere at The Camp of the Saints sees this incident as highly damaging to the Daily Caller.

PREVIOUSLY:

Could Stacy McCain Ever Use An iPad?

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by Smitty

The fedora. The cigarettes. The coffee. The lucid, well-organized prose that sucks the order out of the rest of his life. The laptop that has been beaten in the ‘rented mule’ fashion.
Stacy McCain, whom I guess I’ve known about three years now, is a man so set in his ways that the ruts of his life look like arroyos. At events like CPAC, other bloggers gather, and a relative neophyte will mention Stacy and wonder out loud if some sort of intervention could be undertaken to, you know, pull him back from the cliff just a little bit. For his own safety. The rest listen patiently, recalling their similar thoughts, mutter, shake their heads in the negative, and continue on. You can certainly tell Stacy from a distance; but you can’t tell him much.
All that may change, though, when he sees this:could_this_be_the_trick
The hipster sexiness of the iPad, combined with the retro-gonzo typewriter body straight out of Ernie Pyle? That would out-gonzo Hunter S. Thompson, I reckon. The idea of walking back the touch screen and instead using a typewriter interface seems pure chindogu, but that’s very much in keeping with Stacy himself. Sure, it’s not the infamous Barbie Cam, but. . .it would run TweetDeck.

Charlie Sheen Fails To Retain Stacy McCain As A Creative Consultant, With Predictable Results

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by Smitty

Lots of other blogs are reporting the disaster, but the title hit me when I saw Another Black Conservative. Emphasis mine:

One of the big underpinnings behind Sheen being entertaining is the fact that the man was having a meltdown. For whatever reason, we all love to watch those who reached the top have a spectacular crash to the bottom. Putting on a show and taking it on the road, isn’t exactly crashing to the bottom. To make matters worse, it appears Sheen just did not have enough material for a show.

Hopefully this bomb will speed the end of the Sheen fad.

Or will it? Will the failure to retain Stacy McCain, coupled with abject disaster onstage, compel the GOP to start running Sheen for the 2012 nomination? Let’s face it, kids: the incumbent is setting the bar somewhere around “dive” for November 2012. About the only strategy the GOP can pursue with any hope of scoring a suitable anti-victory is to tunnel under the bar and score a direct hit on the septic tank in the basement.
Sheen is a man who can do that.

Charlie Sheen 2012!

(says the GOP)